The Ultimate Guide for Becoming an Idea Machine
“The way to have good ideas is to get close to killing yourself. It’s like weightlifting. When you lift slightly more than you can handle, you get stronger. When you cut yourself open, you bleed ideas. If you’re broke and close to death, you have to start coming up with ideas. (…) The problem is this: you’re NOT in a state of panic most of the time. States of panic are special and have to be revered. Think about the times in your life that you remember – it’s exactly those moments when you hit bottom and were forced to come up with ideas, to get stronger, to connect with some inner force inside you with the outer force. (…) IDEAS ARE THE CURRENCY OF LIFE. Not money. Money gets depleted until you go broke. But good ideas buy you good experiences, buy you better ideas, buy you better experiences, buy you more time, save your life. Financial wealth is a side effect of the “runner’s high” of your idea muscle.
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TED’s Best Of The Week! Richard Dawkins On Militant Atheism!
A fiery, funny, powerful talk.
Richard Dawkins urges all atheists to openly state their position — and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science. Dawkins is known for his work as a biologist even since his best selling book “The Selfish Gene”. Since, he is combating what he sees as danger in the education system, which is religious studies, particularly, Creationism. In this talk, he raise some interesting points to reflect upon.
“In my view, not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith instead of always insisting on evidence.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism#
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How to Take Notes You Will Remember
Laptop versus hand-written notes: what the difference reveals about memory
“Two psychologists were inspired to carry out the research after noticing a problem with recalling notes taken on a laptop. Pam Mueller, a psychologist at Princeton University, found that switching back to a pen and paper from a laptop had been beneficial.
They set out to test this hunch scientifically by having 65 college students watch TED talks and then have them answer questions about what they’d learnt (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014).
The questions, which were asked 30 minutes after watching the video, fell into two categories:
- Factual-recall: for example, “Approximately how many years ago did the Indus civilization exist?”
- Conceptual-application: for example, “How do Japan and Sweden differ in their approaches to equality within their societies?”
What they found was little difference in factual recall: people could remember about the same proportion of facts in both groups. The big difference came in what people had understood conceptually from the lecture. Here it turned out that the paper-and-pen note-takers had retained a significantly larger proportion of conceptual information. The reason for this difference comes down to the mental processes involved in laptop versus hand-written notes.”
http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/05/how-to-take-notes-you-will-remember.php
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Book Of The Week! The Stranger, by Albert Camus!
The Stranger (French: L’Étranger) is a novel by Albert Camus a French Nobel Prize winning author, journalist, and philosopher, published in 1942. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism.
Albert Camus seeks for answer of eternal questions. How to live if life is tragic and futile? How to live in a world where man is a stranger to himself and to the world around him? Meursault is faced with madness of the world, its’ absurdity and inhumanity. He defends rationality and truth, but in the world devoid of illusions and light, he feels like stranger and lives meaningless life. To the life and world that surrounds him, he is indifferent.
In January 1955, Camus said, “I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’ I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger
On the link below you can watch Italian movie based on this novel.
S. I. COHEN 