Ira: G, what is Neural Link? Gauri: O! Fancy DIY of Elon Musk to enhance brain capacity to compete with AI. Ira: How does he intend to do it? Gauri: Some brain-computer interface. Ira: I want to try that. Gauri: Moorkh! You better stick with your cakes and biryanis. Ira: I want to try that ...(wails). Can I borrow your brain? Gauri: Will you return it safe without damage? Ira: I swear. I will enhance to a capacity you cannot even imagine.
Afternoon's read: Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan Quotes/Style I loved "“Every passing hour brings the Solar System forty-three thousand miles closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules—and still there are some misfits who insist that there is no such thing as progress.” —Ransom K. Ferm" from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "She had published anonymously a slim volume of poems called Between Timid and Timbuktu. It had been reasonably well received. The title derived from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small dictionaries relate to time." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "He climbed from bowl to bowl, intending when he got to the top to see whence he had come and whither he was bound." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "watching the teeny-weeny bowl at the tippy-tippy top brimming over into the next little bowl… and the next little bowl’s brimming over into the next little bowl… and the next little bowl’s brimming over into the next bowl… and on and on and on, a rhapsody of brimming, each bowl singing its own merry water song." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Winston Niles Rumfoord’s smile and handshake dismantled Constant’s high opinion of himself as efficiently as carnival roustabouts might dismantle a Ferris wheel." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they" from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Bobby Denton’s voice grew hoarse and hushed. “You want to fly through space? God has already given you the most wonderful space ship in all creation! Yes! Speed? You want speed? The space ship God has given you goes sixty-six thousand miles an hour—and will keep on running at that speed for all eternity, if God wills it. You want a space ship that will carry men in comfort? You’ve got it! It won’t carry just a rich man and his dog, or just five men or ten men. No! God is no piker! He’s given you a space ship that will carry billions of men, women, and children! Yes! And they don’t have to stay strapped in chairs or wear fishbowls over their heads. No! Not on God’s space ship. The people on God’s space ship can go swimming, and walk in the sunshine and play baseball and go ice skating and go for family rides in the family automobile on Sunday after church and a family chicken dinner!” Bobby Denton nodded. “Yes!” he said. “And if anybody thinks his God is mean for putting things out in space to stop us from flying out there, just let him remember the space ship God already gave us. And we don’t have to buy the fuel for it, and worry and fret over what kind of fuel to use. No! God worries about all that. “God told us what we had to do on this wonderful space ship. He wrote the rules so anybody could understand them. You don’t have to be a physicist or a great chemist or an Albert Einstein to understand them. No! And He didn’t make a whole lot of rules, either. They tell me that if they were to fire The Whale, they would have to make eleven thousand separate checks before they could be sure it was ready to go: Is this valve open, is that valve closed, is that wire tight, is that tank full?—and on and on and on to eleven thousand things to check. Here on God’s space ship, God only gives us ten things to check—and not for any little trip to some big, dead poisonous stones out in space, but for a trip to the Kingdom of Heaven! Think of it! Where would you rather be tomorrow—on Mars or in the Kingdom of Heaven? “You know what the check list is on God’s round, green space ship? Do I have to tell you? You want to hear God’s countdown?” The Love Crusaders shouted back that they did. “Ten!—” said Bobby Denton. “Do you covet thy neighbor’s house, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s?” “No!” cried the Love Crusaders. “Nine!—” said Bobby Denton. “Do you bear false witness against thy neighbor?”" from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The details of her face were insignificant. A cannonball, substituted for her head, would have suited the grand composition as well." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Until that moment of truth, Constant had looked upon his Newport adventure as one more drug-induced hallucination—as one more peyotl party—vivid, novel, entertaining, and of no consequence whatsoever." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "For another thing, Beatrice had bought a capsule of cyanide—more deadly, surely, than Cleopatra’s asp. It was Beatrice’s intention to swallow it if ever she had to share so much as the same time zone with Malachi Constant." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "“The hell with the human race!” said Beatrice. “You’re a member of it, you know,” said Rumfoord. “Then I’d like to put in for a transfer to the chimpanzees!” said Beatrice." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The smoke from her cigarette passed beneath the nostrils of the brown and white girls, and their space-annihilating concupiscence seemed centered on mentholated smoke alone." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive? The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks water from the springs of the bed. This comes very close to describing the genesis of Magnum Opus. The materials with which Noel Constant built his fortune were hardly more nourishing in themselves than calendar dates and bedsprings." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The third man in the second squad of the first platoon of the second company in the third battalion of the second regiment of the First Martian Assault Infantry Division was called Unk. Unk was forty years old. Unk was a well-made man—a light heavyweight, dark-skinned, with poet’s lips, with soft brown eyes in the shaded caves of a Cro-Magnon brow ridge. Incipient baldness had isolated a dramatic scalplock." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Before every tenth barrack was a flagpole with a banner snapping in the keen wind." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "If there had been a lesson in the execution for Unk’s squadmates, they were finding the lesson as digestible as Pablum." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Buddies share the same foxhole, stick right close to each other in attacks, cover each other." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Boaz and Unk, moreover, were made Siamese twins by the long tube of a six-inch siege mortar which they were carrying between them." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The combined cooing of the ships was a melodious thunder that rattled the schoolhouse windowpanes." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The cathedral bells whanged and clanged whenever anything of a religious nature was mentioned." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "“But the crew,” said Rumfoord, “continued to protect him from supposed amatory failure and a broken heart. His ego fizzed, it sizzled, it snapped, it crackled, it popped." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The usual course for such a discomfited historian is to describe the war in the barest, flattest, most telegraphic terms, and to recommend that the reader go at once to Rumfoord’s masterpiece." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin—one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "A single, badly scorched man named Krishna Garu attacked all of India with a double-barreled shotgun. Though there was no one to radio-control him, he did not surrender until his gun blew up. The only Martian military success was the capture of a meat market in Basel, Switzerland, by seventeen Parachute Ski Marines. Everywhere else the Martians were butchered promptly, before they could even dig in." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Theirs was a wavelet, really, composed, as it was, of only forty-six ships." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The planet Mercury sings like a crystal goblet. It sings all the time. One side of Mercury faces the Sun. That side has always faced the Sun. That side is a sea of white-hot dust. The other side faces the nothingness of space eternal. That side has always faced the nothingness of space eternal. That side is a forest of giant blue-white crystals, aching cold. It is the tension between the hot hemisphere of day-without-end and the cold hemisphere of night-without-end that makes Mercury sing. Mercury has no atmosphere, so the song it sings is for the sense of touch." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut Vocabulary I loved "Skip’s Museum was a museum of mortal remains—of endoskeletons and exoskeletons—of shells, coral, bone, cartilage, and chiton—of dottles and orts and residua of souls long gone." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Gimcrack religions were big business." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "He was Malachi Constant of Hollywood, California, the richest American—and a notorious rakehell." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "To follow the analogy of the thief who is going through another man’s billfold:" from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "he thought that he might as well show Rumfoord her, too—show Rumfoord what a celestial lulu he had given the gate to." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Healthy, charming, wise children were the desiderata." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "For another thing, Beatrice Rumfoord had liquidated her diversified portfolio of securities, and had put the proceeds into shares of Galactic Spacecraft, intending thereby to get a leather-lunged voice in whatever was done with The Whale." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "She had a voice like a grackle. “Hey, space cadet!” she yelled." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "When Unk got back to his barrack, jungle knives and bayonets were being honed with harsh scree-scraws." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "He wore his black Homburg hat and his black Chesterfield coat. He carried his whangee walking stick at port arms. He" from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "The walls of the caves in their depths are phosphorescent. They give off a jonquil-yellow light." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "and that idea was to seek shelter for the precious troops and matériel" from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "catsup, sporting goods, and soda pop?”" from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "Beatrice, already ghostly in a white peignoir, turned the color of lead." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "for he was superior to Constant père and fils in every respect but one, and the respect excepted was the only one that really mattered. The" from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut "“Sitting on an American Levitation couch is harder than standing up in a birchbark canoe,” said Fern dryly." from "The Sirens of Titan" by Kurt Vonnegut Sundry It's not a wave but a wavelet. Their motto was Per aspera ad astra A whoop-dee-doo! glass-eyed robots boodle they were crack agents! space-annihilating concupiscence And of course, Malachi Constant!
It’s fun! It’s amazing! It’s playful! One of the best Disney films I have seen (ye’ not a big fan of Frozen). Disney’s “Sword in the Stone”, released in 1963, is the last of Walt Disney’s animation films before his death. The movie is based on a novel by T.H. White. The songs by Sherman Brothers are singalong with a distinctive comical lyrics. My favourite is Higitus Figitus Higitus Figitus zumbabazing I want your attention ev'rything! We're packing to leave come on let's go books are always the first you know Hockety pockety wockety wack abracabra dabra nack Shrink in size very small we've got to save enough room for all Higitus Figitus migitus mum pres-ti-dig-i-ton-i-um! Cicero you belong to the "C's" alphabethical order please Ali-i-ca-fez bal-a-ca-zez malacamez meripides diminish diminish dictionary those words in your vocabulary Hockety pockety wockety wack that's the way we have to pack. Higitus Figitus migitus mum pres-ti-dig-i-ton-i-um! Higitus Figitus zoomacazam don't get in a trafic jam Higitus Figitus migitus mum, pres-ti-dig-i-ton-i-um!
Poor people in America voted for the richest administration in US history. Why? Because they believe they are all future rich people one opportunity away from striking it big. To the American psyche poverty is a temporary state, easily overcome. Vonnegut had his finger on the pulse of American Republican politics. “America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five Tralfamadorian wisdom - “- Why me? - That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? - Yes. - Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "so it goes.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five My personal favorite quote from the book. “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
The illusion of control! Nevermind that we are "meat-coated skeletons" clinging to a rock hurtling through space at a thousand miles a minute, we must have control! Reminds me of the story about dysfunctional pedestrian walk-buttons at traffic intersections. Some say that nearly three-quarters of them in NYC haven't worked since the city started upgrading traffic control systems, but the buttons have been left in place as placebos for irate pedestrians. It probably isn't entirely true but a funny idea nevertheless. : ) Wow! Sold me on the Sirens of Titan. Next on my list.
That's a treasure house you put up! Haha! This is the subtle humour one might miss out in a hurried read. Vonnegut's books have to be read and re-read for the humour he weighs in, at least expected turn of the page. My personal favourite in his collection is Breakfast of Champions (BoC). Followed by Slaughterhouse-Five and The Sirens of Titan. Kilgore Trout in BoC is as amused with the American collective conscience as we are of Kilgore's tongue-in-cheek critique. Not any “Glorious Find” as we need a watchword for such finds. Say, “Yetu Finds” — our serendipitous discovery where we go looking for something and return with something else. Who would have expected that a video game would garner interest for a song on the aside, not even the Tralfamadorians. I love the Yetu and have listened to it couple of times. So, these finds are “Yetu Finds”. I was lazily browsing the catalogue when I came across Rufoo. I watched his lecture on Seneca and was hooked to his storytelling charm. Wish all history lectures employed storytelling techniques to enrich the topic with intrigue and trivia. Rufus supplements the book summary with historical context, political context and biographical juice, which for us to hunt will be time-consuming. There he goes, a succinct and worthy narrative for any classical literature junkies. My personal favourite in that collection is “Tristan and Isolde”. No spoilers for you but there is a scene in a lake where Isolde alights from a barge and then .... Indeed Rufus is my best find so far. More to discover and share. If I promised something over the weekend and slacked off , there are too many irons in the fire. The six-part War and Peace drama series commissioned by BBC in 2016 gave me little time for anything else. Have you seen it? Recent addition to Netflix. The 2016 glitz and angst of Rostovs, Bezukhovs and Bolkonskys is a must-watch. I loved the series. More than the visuals, I loved the score. I have been listening to the soundtrack since then, my favourite, on Vassily Kuragin, is here.
One more Yetu find is 3quarksdaily. I was reading about Abbas Raza in Edge magazine and was curious about him so I digged his works. Then, I came across his aggregator blog. In his own words on 3 QUARKS DAILY, Six days a week (Tuesday through Sunday) the editors of 3 Quarks present eight to twelve interesting items from around the web each day, in the areas of science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else we deem inherently fascinating. We want to provide you with a one-stop intellectual surfing experience by culling good stuff from all over and putting it in one place. In other words, we are what has come to be known as an "aggregator" or "filter" blog. And we try not to be afraid of challenging material. If you are not subscribed, do it now! now, I mean now! Stop everything and N-O-W! You will love it! I have come across references and works in those articles that embody our "Yetu" excitement.
Gauri, Usually charged minds are stirred into action when they stumble on coming-of-age interrogation like "Who is John Galt". When I look back on our journey here, that coming-of-age introspection kindled with "Who is Borges". Today when I recall the footprints from Borges to Sandburg to Dawkins to Feneon to Krzhizhanovsky to Medawar, I am gently disturbed on how little I knew/know. My frame my mind is best encapsulated in this Newton's quote: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” ― Isaac Newton My best Yetu moment is finding a purpose in my pursuits rather than spouting fiddle-faddle. That Borges is the most intensive Yetu call to action, a moment of self-reflection on my low standard of intellectual curiosity. Who would have expected that in a social virtual forum such brief moments will forge into something so unique and meaningful in life. I must tell you, that Borges really sent me on a inferior spin and to crawl myself out of that abyss took years to bring myself to a standing where I could tell someone "This is Borges". Thanks for the fellowship of neurite.
Poll Time: Which bygone television series would you like to reappear on Netflix? Growing up, my parents were extremely generous on telly hours. I mean anytime, anywhere ... no strict rules on the content or the length of the programmes. However, I ended up watching what the rest of the siblings tuned to, therefore, I watched a lot of television just because they happened to watch. One such programme is "Twilight Zone". I must be too young and for a episode or two I was scared, and then thrilled, and when I got the hang of the series, I was addicted. I don't remember the discrete episodes, however, I have vague recollections of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Would love to catch the original series on Netflix. What is yours?
