Purity Is Obscurity

Reflection on a Wicked World
by Ogden Nash

Purity
Is obscurity.

Information Attention and Herbet Simon

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
- Herbert Simon
(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/herbertsim181919.html)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/09/where_attention.php
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2005/11/the_looming_att.html
http://sapventures.typepad.com/main/2005/11/the_looming_att.html
http://scientific-presentations.com/2009/10/10/learning-from-herbert-simon/
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/08/wealth-information-takes-attention-patient.html




Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.
- Herbert Simon


Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
- Herbert Simon


In the computer field, the moment of truth is a running program; all else is prophecy.
- Herbert Simon


Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.
- Herbert Simon


The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
- Herbert Simon


The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.
- Herbert Simon


There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we're bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we're good people we use it for good purposes.
- Herbert Simon

Goethe - Epigrams on The World, Life and Doing

• The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.
• The passing day is prey to error. Time commands success and achievement.
• Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality.

Goethe - Every Day (epigram)

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

Goethe - Human Limits (excerpt)

A little ring
Confines our lives,
And many generations
For ever they link
On to their being's
Infinite chain.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - "Human Limits" (excerpt, last stanza), p 35 from "Roman Elegies and other poems and epigrams", trans. Michael Hamburger, Anvil, 1996

The Way of Heaven

The Way of heaven is silent,
It has no appearance, no pattern.
It is so vast that its
Limit cannot be reached;
It is so deep that it
Cannot be fathomed.
It is always evolving
Along with people,
But knowledge cannot grasp it.
It turns like a wheel,
Beginninglessly and endlessly,
Effective as a spirit.
Open and empty,
It goes along with the flow,
Always coming afterward
And never in the forefront

-- Lao- tzu

Sharing Happiness

"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."

-- Buddha

Stranger Than Fiction

See "Stranger Than Fiction".
My take on it:
About mid-life crisis and addressing life in a purely existential manner, heavily influenced by JP Sartre and literary conceit (in a manner).
Facing one's own death willingly and with fore-knowledge.
The "redemption" (not really, but in a manner of speaking only) of realising that life is created every second and is not directed or ordained or inevitable.
A very modern darwinian view on life - that nothing is impossible - only improbable: some things may be very very very highly improbable yet nothing is ever impossible. Life is, in fact, purely statistical - which makes life glorious and worthwhile and ultimately meaningful.