The world's fastest Indian

Very nice movie.
Everyone feels so good in the company of Burt Munro. I thought it was becasue of his honesty as a person. He didnt have anything to hide from anyone. He was
almost always super-comfortable in his skin. Like most old people Tom could make Mr.Burt uncomfortable by asking him about death.

What Do Women Want? Just Ask - New York Times

What Do Women Want? Just Ask - New York Times: "We are perhaps on the first step to a matriarchal society; women will earn more money than men if current trends continue by 2028,” said Michael J. Silverstein of the Boston Consulting Group. “The trend has been escalating in the last 10 years as there has been a gradual, slow erosion of the power balance in the family, a psychic rebalancing.”

Women, Mr. Silverstein added, are “controlling purchases and driving a shift in our economy.”

Retailers like Home Depot, Lowe’s, Sears, Best Buy and others recognize that women are running their households like purchasing managers. Some are “identifying stores that have more female shoppers and offering additional services,” including sales support, customized signs and special product displays, said Dana L. Telsey, who runs her own independent research firm. Travel companies, automakers, and other companies, meanwhile, have had to cater to the tastes of women who have careers outside the home and are pursuing hobbies and other pricey interests. The phenomenon is readily apparent on the Internet, where Web sites built around the needs and interests of such groups as female homeowners and car buyers have gained steady traction."

Will Power make them crazy too ? Will a matriarchal society offer secondary status to men ? Will men be able to adapt to the change ? It'll be very interesting :)

U.S. Jobs Shape Condoms’ Role in Foreign Aid - New York Times

U.S. Jobs Shape Condoms’ Role in Foreign Aid - New York Times: "One, Garry Appling, a 41-year-old single mother, has worked before as a $6-an-hour cashier at Krystal, the fast food restaurant, and another at $7.15 an hour in a chicken processing plant. She said her 10-year-old daughter, Anterria, worries that she will have to go back to the chicken plant, a place so cold and wet Ms. Appling often fell ill.

But even facing her own impending job loss, Ms. Appling took a moment to empathize with the women making condoms on the other side of the world.

“We need a job — I guess they do, too,” she said, during a brief pause from feeding condoms into an intricate, rotating, whooshing machine that tested them for holes. “It’s sad.

“At the same time, the United States can’t just keep helping overseas. They’ve got to help us, too.”"

Its Nature's law that when you are at the lower end of the scale, smaller stimuli can affect huge changes. A capitalistic society like the American one has an almost exponential distribution of wealth. That is, as you move up the social ladder you have rate of accumulation of wealth continually grows.
The other role of capitalism seems to be, levelling the floor on which people around the world compete. This affects the poor in the US to a much more significant level than it does the relatively well-off sections of society. They have less opportunity (less pre-adapted) and more need to adapt. (I learnt a new term called pre-adaptation, which is essentially how well suited you are to adapt. For example having some air bags when you were a fish which could evolve into lungs as you adapt to conditions on land. This is proposed as a model for predicting the future economic/financial situations).

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: The Evolution of Future Wealth -- Technologies evolve much as species do, and that underappreciated f

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: The Evolution of Future Wealth -- Technologies evolve much as species do, and that underappreciated fact is the key to growth: "One of the key ideas in modern evolutionary theory is that of preadaptation. The term may sound oxymoronic but its significance is perfectly logical: every feature of an organism, in addition to its obvious functional characteristics, has others that could become useful in totally novel ways under the right circumstances. The forerunners of air-breathing lungs, for example, were swim bladders with which fish maintained their equilibrium; as some fish began to move onto the margins of land, those bladders acquired a new utility as reservoirs of oxygen. Biologists say that those bladders were preadapted to become lungs. Evolution can innovate in ways that cannot be prestated and is nonalgorithmic by drafting and recombining existing entities for new purposes--shifting them from their existing function to some adjacent novel function--rather than inventing features from scratch."

IndianExpress.com :: In judiciary’s most crowded space, Muslims are invisible

IndianExpress.com :: In judiciary’s most crowded space, Muslims are invisible: "This is worrying not because Muslim judicial officers would be expected to look after their own. Some, if not most, of the finest judgments of the Supreme Court or even independent judges on matters of social and religious violence and strife have not been taken by a “Muslim” bench: be it the matter of the Gujarat riot cases being re-tried or even the landmark Justice Srikrishna Report on the Bombay riots.

Yet, says former Chief Justice of India Justice J S Verma: “It’s not democracy alone that can sustain a society like India. It has to be an inclusive democracy. Democracy can last and be resilient only if all sections of society are taken along.”"


This under-representation is a reflection of the other problem of Muslims in India occupying the lower (financial) strata of the society. They are the less fortunate who are not presented with similar opportunities.

Skype founders plan to launch Web TV service: paper - Yahoo! News

Skype founders plan to launch Web TV service: paper - Yahoo! News: "The project, code-named Venice, will bring quality TV programmes for free to consumers who have a broadband Internet connection, he told Boersen financial newspaper."

Hmmm

"The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
- Oscar Wilde"

Diary: Learned Responses

The brain is wired in such a way that we will find something shocking, only if it is not a something we have been well exposed to.
If we have a memory of an event, then when we encounter the event the next time, our brain will just output the learned response (the same response we had the last couple of times) and not trigger any mechanism which gives us the feeling of shock or surprise.
So if we hear about deaths on TV and we are shocked the first time but we respond by just carrying on with our lives then the brain learns to be more blase about such facts.
This is manifest by the level of fear you feel when you see insects. As a kid a lot of us are scared by insects, but if we are forced to live among roaches, as a lot of kids in the developing world do, then we slowly overcome our fears. This is a learned response.
I think this is also manifest in the way people age. When you are young, you are enraged by any kind of injustice happening in any corner of the world. As you grow older you still have a logical reaction to it but you don't get the same feelings you did as when you were young. It could also be that as we grow older we learn that, some situations are immutable and just a function of human social behavior (which is far away from the ideal world that our brains can imagine). But again the initial response is a learned reponse from the brain.


Thought triggered by the program "Now" on PBS (www.pbs.org)

Sources :
Phantoms in the brain - Dr. VS Ramachandran
On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkings



Afterthoughts:
The conclusions here seem so trivial when I pen it down, but as I was thinking about it, it seemed to be a very intersting thought.

Common experience

Most of us in today's time all across the world have one  experience in common :  " the blue screen of death"