Rah's Rants

[raniarah]

"...innovation in the modern economy isn't just snazzy new technologies, but also boringly efficient systems." - History's best overlooked inventions, Time, Sep 18, 2017.

[raniarah]

Emotional manipulation

"In a very fearful and tribalistic society, we run on emotion, which is the currency of social media." - Time, July 20 2017, Viral Anger Spreads like a disease

[raniarah]

To say nothing of outrages like the assassination of Kim Jong Nam. The tragedy is that he really just wanted to be left alone. But because of his blood, and his birth, he couldn't be. Which is a wretched lot shared by all North Koreans.

Time Magazine, March 13, 2017 issue. "Murder at Terminal 2". By Charlie Campbell/ Beijing

[raniarah]

Swan Lake ballet on ice by Volosozhar & Trankov at 2012 World Championship

This is Long Program of Tatiana Volosozhar & Maxim Trankov at 2012 World Figure Skating Championships. Look at their longing for win! They were fantastic! Af...

[raniarah]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaxZeisCHv8)

All authors say the art of storytelling lies in how successfully you invoke the emotions of the audience. People may forget what you said or did, but they won’t forget how you made them feel. 

[raniarah]

Forty years ago, a fencer from a small town in Germany landed at the Olympic Games in Montreal. “My first impression,” says Thomas Bach, now president of the International Olympic Committee, “was sitting on a bus full of athletes together with

The good, the bad, and the evil- above all, each Olympics is a retelling of the same narrative: ordinary people achieving greatness before a watching world. 

“He was captivated by the ideology of Olympism, which mixes two ancient dreams: human perfection and human brotherhood.”

[theparisreview]

Just Build Your Own Disneyland, and Other News

Dymtro Szylak’s installation in Michigan, “Hamtramck Disneyland.” Photo via HyperallergicYou might, if you’re lucky, retire someday, and it’s never too early to start thinking about what you’ll do with all that free time. You may think you’ve got it all figured out—I’ll just build a wacky Disneyland spinoff in my backyard, you say to yourself.... Read More »

[wingspan]

If my life were a day

You are the moment before the sun sinks into the horizon. The transient light- the ephemeral hues set against the fading, fading sky.

Until I am left only with the moon to refract your light. And in your absence, the stars to guide me-like a cosmic runaway- steadily into the dark.

— Lang leav

[raniarah]

Building tech empires

FT: Where America has fangs, Britain has stubby molars.

“Europe has talked about the need to build tech champions, others just do it, writes Robert Colvile.” 

Ouch.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7a7f7dec-d561-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html?ftcamp=crm/email//nbe/UKBusiness/product#axzz40WOpAvfQ

[raniarah]

kairosclerosis, n

Definition: The moment you realise that you’re currently happy- consciously trying to savour the feeling- which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste. 

[raniarah]

17 Times Hyperbole And A Half Just GETS You

"Cake. Cake. Cake. Cake is the only thing that matters."

[raniarah]

A memoir of Kalanithi

Kalanithi died in March of 2015, leaving behind When Breath Becomes Air — a ledger of precisely such enormity and a rare masterwork of duality in which the tragedy of death isn’t subverted or diluted but coexists, every bit as real, with the triumph of aliveness as the highest human potentiality. 

"All life is lived in the shadow of its own finitude, of which we are always aware — an awareness we systematically blunt through the daily distraction of living. But when this finitude is made acutely imminent, one suddenly collides with awareness so acute that it leaves no choice but to fill the shadow with as much light as a human being can generate — the sort of inner illumination we call meaning: the meaning of life."

“I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. 

Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values… Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life”.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/01/13/when-breath-becomes-paul-kalanithi/

[raniarah]

“Get too judgmental and moral, and you deny them their charm, which was as important to their rise as their brutality. Become too enamoured, and you’ve made heroes of monsters.” - Empire Review of Legend

[raniarah]

“Boxing was an integral part of school life. The aim was to instil the sport’s lessons of self-discipline, confidence, patience and practice.”

“Whatever I was able to teach him was nothing compared to what he taught me.” 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2209150/Tom-Ogg-How-Oxford-graduate-gave-group-disruptive-children-chance-education.html#ixzz3o1xSXWeS Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

[raniarah]

The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses—behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.

Muhammad Ali 

http://communitytable.parade.com/264190/viannguyen/50th-anniversary-of-liston-clay-fight-15-of-muhammad-alis-best-quotes/

[raniarah]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErvgV4P6Fzc)

[raniarah]

I see what you did there.

A linguistics prof said "In English, a double negative forms a positive. But in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language in the world where a double positive forms a negative." A student chortled, "Yeah, right."