**shudder**

You know, it can be a little intimidating when a multi-million dollar company asks you for advice, follows it, and then forwards it to the party its dealing with so they can follow your instructions too (of course I forwarded it to my supervising attorney just to keep him in the loop, of course).

Now Reading

Geeze. I can't belive I did it again - I skipped over another book. I finished The Lessons of History (highly recommended) and read (and just finished) Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton.

It's the sequel to Pandora's Star. As with his other books, its a well written "space opera" with a multitude of characters all belding together to write a comlpete story of a futuristic human space civilization. A fabulously fun read.

I've now started Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by James Bradley - he also wrote Flags of Our Fathers which was recently made into a movie. It's a WWII book about the air raids that were taking place on the island of Chichi Jima while the land and sea battles for neighboring Iwo Jima were raging. I've only got through one chapter so no conclusions yet but it came highly recommended.

Somehow appropriate...

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) You are a light and humorous person. No one can help but to smile to your wit. Now if only the improbability drive would stop turning you into weird stuff. Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 88% Moya (Farscape) 81% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 81% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 81% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 81% SG-1 (Stargate) 75% Serenity (Firefly) 69% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 63% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 63% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 63% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 44%

Windbelt - Third World Power - Wind Generator - Video - Breakthrough Awards - Popular Mechanics

Windbelt - Third World Power - Wind Generator - Video - Breakthrough Awards - Popular Mechanics

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus - New York Times

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus - New York Times

What kind of Warrior are you?

My sphere is Guardian (Person of great Love and Altruism), and my class is Arms Master (Pragmatic and Stout). I am a Guard. You are a true, versatile guard. You have a defensive nature, that is, you are good at instilling a sense of security in the places around you. A strong presence weakens any possible threats around you, and a swift, practical approach to the problems that crop up puts them down before they can get out of hand. What kind of Warrior are you?

On the Prolongation of Life

"Some time ago a convention of morticians discussed the danger threatening their industry from the increasing tardiness of men in keeping their rendezvous with death. But if undertakers are miserable progress is real." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Details

"History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusions from it can be made by a selection of instances." - Will and Ariel Dural The Lessons of History

Eternity

"Life has no inherent claim to eternity, whether in individuals or in states. Death is natural, and if it comes in due time is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no offense from its coming...
Nations die. Old regions grow arid, or suffer other change. Resilient man picks up his tools and his arts, and moves on, taking his memories with him. If education has deepened and broadened those memories, civilization migrates with him, and builds somewhere another home. In the new land he need not begin entirely anew, nor make his way without friendly aid; communication and transport bind him, as in a nourishing placenta, with his mother country. Rome imported Greek civilization and transmitted it to Western Europe; America profited from European civilization and prepares to pass it on, with a technique of transmission never equaled before.
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As life overrides death with reproduction, so an aging culture hands its patrimony down to its heirs across the years and the seas. Even as these lines are being written, commerce and print, wires and waves and invisible Mercuries of the air are binding nations and civilizations together, preserving for all what each has given to the heritage of mankind." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Patterns in History

"History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large. We may reasonably expect that in the future, as in the past, some new states will rise, some old states will subside; that new civilizations will begin with pasture and agriculture, expand into commerce and industry, and luxuriate with finance; that thought (as Vico and Comte argued) will pass, by and large, from supernatural to legendary to naturalistic explanations; that new theories, inventions, discoveries, and errors will agitate the intellectual currents; that new generations will rebel against the old and pass from rebellion to conformity and reaction; that experiments in morals will loosen tradition and frighten its beneficiaries; and that the excitement of innovation will be forgotten in the unconcern of time. History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness, and man is equipped to respond in stereotyped ways to frequently occurring situations and stimuli like hunger, danger, and sex. But in a developed and complex civilization individuals are more differentiated and unique than in primitive society, and many situations contain novel circumstances requiring modifications of instinctive response; custom recedes, reasoning spreads; the results are less predictable. There is no certainty that the future will repeat the past. Every year is an adventure." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

History and War

"War is one of the constants of history, and has not yet diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war. We have acknowledged war as at present the ultimate form of competition and natural selection in the human species. "Polemos pater panton," said Heracleitus; war, or competition, is the father of all things, the potent source of ideas, inventions, institutions, and states. Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
The causes of war are the same as the causes of competition among individuals: acquisitiveness, pugnacity, and pride; the desire for food, land, materials, fuels, mastery. The state has our instincts without our restrains. The individual submits to restrains laid upon him by morals and laws, and agrees to replace combat with conference because the sate guarantees him basic protection in his life, property, and legal rights. The state itself acknowledges no substantial restraints, either because it is strong enough to defy any interference with its will or because there is no superstate to offer it basic protection, and no international law or moral code wielding effective force.
In the individual, pride gives added vigor in the competitions of life; in the state, nationalism gives added force in diplomacy and war."- Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Warnings to Democracy

"It has defended itself with courage and energy against the assaults of foreign dictatorship, and has not yet yielded to dictatorship at home. But if war continues to absorb and dominate it, or if the itch to rule the world requires a large military establishment and appropriation, the freedoms of democracy may one by one succumb to the discipline of arms and strife. If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Democracy

"All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighs its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and class... Democracy has now dedicated itself resolutely to the spread and lengthening of education, and to the maintenance of public health. If equality of educational opportunity can be established, democracy will be real and justified. For this is the vital truth beneath its catchwords: that though men cannot be equal, their access to education and opportunity can be made more nearly equal. The rights of man are not rights to office and power, but the rights of entry into every avenue that may nourish and test a man's fitness for office and power. A right is not a gift of God or nature but a privilege which it is good for the group that the individual should have." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Democracy and Ignorance

" Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forget to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign. Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that "you mustn't enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it." However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that "you can't fool all the people all the time," but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country."- Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Revolution

"Since wealth is an order and procedure of production and exchange rather than an accumulation of (mostly perishable) goods, and is a trust (the "credit system") in men and institutions rather than in the intrinsic value of paper money or checks, violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it.l There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Minority Rule

"Hence most governments have been oligarchies-ruled by a minority, chosen either by birth, as in aristocracies, or by religious organization, as in theocracies, or by wealth, as in democracies. It is unnatural (as even Rousseau saw) for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized for united and specific action, and a minority can. If the majority of abilities is contained a minority of men, minority government is as inevitable as the concentration of wealth; the majority can do no more than periodically throw out one minority and set up another."- Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Freedom

"Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos. So the prime task of government is to establish order; oganized central force is the sole alternative to incalculable and disruptive force in private hands. Power naturally converges to a center, for it is ineffective when divided, diluted, and spread..."- Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Security

"Other factors equal, interal liberty varies inversely as external danger." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History

Something in the Way She Moves? -- Holden 2007 (1005): 2 -- ScienceNOW

Something in the Way She Moves? -- Holden 2007 (1005): 2 -- ScienceNOW: "In a particularly stimulating study, researchers have found that lap dancers--women who work in strip joints and, for cash, gyrate in the laps of seated men--earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The finding suggests that women subtly signal when they are most fertile, although just how they do it is not clear."

History and Economics

"The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiaism prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient. Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce-except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.
Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the laws. Despotism may for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it. The relative equality of Americans before 1776 has been overwhelmed by a thousand forms of physical, mental, and economic differentiation, so that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is now greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome. In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the poor rivals the strength of ability in the rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

History

"Let us define history, in its troublesome duplicity, as the events or record of the past. Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty. At any moment a comet may come too close to the earth and set out little globe topsy-turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off tangentially-as some think our planet did a few astronomic moments ago-and fall upon us in a wild embrace ending in grief and pain. we accept these possibilities in out stride, and retort to the cosmos in the words of Pascal: "When the universe has crushed him, he will still be the nobler that that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.""- Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

History and God

"Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean not the creative vitality of nature but a supreme being intelligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative. Like other departments of biology, history remains at bottom a natural selection of the fittest individuals and groups in a struggle wherein goodness receives no favors, misfortunes abound, and the final test is the ability to survive. As to the crimes, wars, and cruelties of man, the earthquakes, storms, tornadoes, pestilences, tidal waves, and other "acts of God" that periodically desolate human and animal life, and the total evidence suggests either a blind or an impartial fatality, with incidental order, splendor, beauty, or sublimity. If history supports any theology this would be a dualism like the Zoroastrian or Manichean: a good spirit and an evil spirit battling for control of the universe and men's souls. These faiths and Christianity (which is essentially Manichean) assured their followers that the good spirit would win in the end; but of this consummation history offers no guarantee. Nature and history do not agree with our concepts of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under; and the universe has no prejudice in favor of Christ as against Genghis Khan." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

Religion

"Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensible, in every land and age. To the unhappy, the suffering, the bereaved, the old, it has brought supernatural comforts valued by millions of souls as more precious as any natural aid. It has helped parents and teachers to discipline the young. It has conferred meaning and dignity upon the lowliest existence, and through its sacrements has made for stability by transforming human covenants into solemn relationships with God. It has kept the poor (said Napolean) from murdering the rich. For since the natural inequality of men dooms many of us to poverty or defeat, some supernatural hope may be the sole alternative to despair. Destroy that hope, and class war is intensified. Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well: when one goes down, the other goes up; when religion declines Communism grows." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

Changes

"Intellect is therefore a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and distructuive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdoms of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratories of history. A youth boilnjg with hormones will wonder why he should give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraits if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.
So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it-perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more viral than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; that is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classe, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole."- Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

Morality

"Perhaps discipline will be restored in our civilization through the military training required by the challenges of war. The freedom of the part varies with the security of the whole; individualism will diminish in America and England as geographical protection ceases. Sexual license may cure itself through its own excesses; our unmoored children may live to see order and modesty become fashionable; clothing more stimulating that nudity. Meanwhile much of our moral freedom is good: it is pleasant to be relived of theological terrors, to enjoy without qualm the pleasures that harm neither others nor ourselves, and to fee the tang of the open air upon our liberated flesh."- Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

I just like the way this is worded...

"Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species. a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or douter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads-astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war-what history has to say about the nature, conduct, and prospects of man. It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusion. We proceed." - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

poetic justice

There is no humorist like history. - Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

Life

"We must remind ourselves again that history as written (peccavimus) is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting-because it is exceptional. If all those individuals who had no Boswell has found thier numerically proportionate place in the pages of historians we should have a duller but juster view of the past and of man. Behind the red facade of war and politics, misfortune and poverty, adultery and divorce, murder and suicide, were millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages, men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children. Even in recorded history we find so many instances of goodness, even of nobility, that we can forgive, though not forget, the sins. The gifts of charity have almost equaled the cruelties of battlefields and jails." -Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History.

Inequality and Freedom

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups. - Will and Ariel Durant in The Lessons of History

BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | Burning chilli sparks terror fear

BBC NEWS UK England London Burning chilli sparks terror fear: "A pot of burning chilli sparked fears of a biological terror attack in central London. "


Nam Prik Pao recipe:
Heat garlic and challots in oil and remove to a bowl
Place red chillies in the pan with some oil and fry until they go dark in colour. Then set aside
Mix shrimp paste with the rest of the ingredients and pound in a mortar and pestle
Return the mixture to the heat until it becomes a thick dark coloured paste

Now Reading

The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

I'd listened to this as a book on tape once and it immediately grabbed my attention. I've been trying to get a written version ever since and now I finally got it. No doubt I will be making posts on this one.