Category: bits

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Full text: Invoking Hitler, Raghuram Rajan warns: A strong govt may not move in the right direction

When Dr Raghuram Rajan, Governor, Reserve Bank of India, was invited to DD Kosambi Ideas Festival held on February 20, 2015 in Goa, who’d have thought that he would discard his RBI hat and put on his hat as “a professor in the field known as political economy “? And go on to give an extraordinary s

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My government (I’m in the UK) recently said that children here should learn up to their 12 times table by the age of 9. Now, I always believed that the reason why I learned my 12 times table was because of the money system that the UK used to have—12 pennies in a shilling. Since that madness ended with decimalization the year after I was born, by the late 1970s when I had to learn my 12 times table, it already seemed to be an anachronistic waste of time.To find it being given new emphasis nearly 40 years later struck me as so odd that I thought I should investigate it a little more mathematically. Here is what I concluded.

Source: Is There Any Point to the 12 Times Table?—Wolfram Blog

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First, it signals a deep aversion to risk. As a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?

Source: How to Live Without Irony – The New York Times

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Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.

Source: 9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings – Brain Pickings

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The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. It represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web – a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralisation – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realised how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete. Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The only way to stay outside this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep’ … Derakhshan. Photograph: Arash Ashoorinia for the GuardianNearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object – the same as a photo, or a piece of text. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting. But links are not objects, they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped hyperlinks of their immense powers.

Source: Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web | Technology | The Guardian