Arbit Gyan !

Johny Appleseed

Johny Chapman, was known for planting nurseries of apple Trees. He was a wanderer who planted these nurseries to most of the places he went, mostly in and around Ohio , Indiana in USA. He kind of brought about apple revolution. Most famous images of his, show him spreading appleseeds , which has brought about this name, Johny Appleseed.

He lived from 1774 to 1845, never got married as he believed women to be deceivers. He had great affection towards animals. One famous story exemplified it when he bought a horse which was to be brought down, bought green fields for him to recover and then gave it to some needy with a promise to treat the horse humanely.

Johny Appleseed can be used in language to refer to someone who developed any specific industry like father of IT Industry in India can also be stated as Johny Appleseed of IT industry in India.
Danilo Blandon is known as 'Johny Appleseed of Crack'


Celibacy tax

Celibacy can be referred to as the tendency to not to have sexual intercourse. Now it might sound a bit weird, as taxing somebody this.
In Romania around 1966, when Nicolae Ceausescu came to power, celibacy tax was introduced which used to tax a women who has not conceived. Tax was 10 % of the monthly wage. This was one of the horrible laws introduced by Nicolae to increase the population of Romania from 23 Mn to 30 Mn. He said ' The Fetus is the property of the entire society'.

Irony is he was overthrown by the protests by youth a lot of whom were born because abortion was made illegal. This policy let to drastic increase in crime rates, poverty and malnutrition.

Its Weird!!!!!!!!!!!!

How about the thought of going out for a movie alone!!!!!!!!!!

Its weird to most of us ……isn’t it ……….?

Probably we have been going to theatres to watch movie only with parents or friends ……… It has always been a group outing not an individual one!!!!!!!!!!

I was 7-8 when I went for my first theatre movie “Shahanshah” with parents, but to our disappointment its screening in that theatre in Panipat was delayed by a week. Having come so far we didn’t want to go back on that Sunday without watching a movie. Hence we ended up watching the D-grade movie “Ghabrahat” in the same theatre (Then there used to be only one screen in a theatre). This is how movie watching culture is cultivated as group activity in most of us.

Somehow we always feel comfortable in our space filled with conceptions, ideals, and ‘the’ way to do things. It’s always difficult to come out of it or think beyond it.

I think there are expiry dates to “the right” ways.

There is a hell lot of a difference in the way I and my dad watch movies, in fact my own way of watching movies have changed drastically in last 3 yrs.

SO it’s extremely important to question the conceptions that develop over a period of time.

TIMES CHANGE, PEOPLE CHANGE, YOU CHANGE ---- ‘THE WAY’ to do things can or should change!!!!!!!!!

Brain ...........from Fooled by Randomness !!!!!!!!

Brain

Its so ironic that we hardly give any thought to the functioning of our thinking engine. All of us think. What is it to ‘Think’?

One school of thought (Herbert Simon) relates it to optimization. According to him our brain is a big optimization machine. Another aspect related to this is about the level or extent of optimization. It takes infinite effort and time to bring most optimized solution.

It means our brain must have some indications on when to stop optimizing or when is it safe to approximate. We can call these as ‘set of rules’. So our brain is a big optimizing machine with a set of rules in it which helps in approximation. But there is a slightly contrary opinion to it from Kahneman and Tversky.

Our brains are always biased hence are not optimizers. They have a ‘heuristic’ approach to optimization which gets affected by the recent events. Brain does not have a central processing system . It does not process all the information it has to think. It is usually biased towards a more recent information or else affected by other attributes. It is more of local rather than global optimization. This can probably explain different responses to similar situations at different times

Nice Thought

A democracy is more about good courts than it is about good elections. ............Fareed Zakaria