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Quid Pro Quo With The Gods

Discussion in 'Cheeniya's Senile Ramblings' started by Cheeniya, May 20, 2017.

  1. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    @Novalis
    1344 Women and Patents
    This is a subject that never crossed my mind and I set about exploring this.
    I was attracted by this title:
    "Why Do Women Inventors Hold So Few Patents?
    At the rate we’re going, women won’t hold as many patents as men until the year 2092."

    Going further I found this:
    What the 100-Patent Woman Wants Innovative Girls To Know
    This topic seems inexhaustible. Will explore..
     
  2. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1345 Louis XV
    I have heard of Kings who had large stables but this is the first time I hear of an association between a King and a Stapler! The guy impressed me and I looked up further for him. He married a woman who was seven years elder to him. Both of them had impressive signatures:
    The King [​IMG]

    The Queen
    [​IMG]

    I cannot thank you adequately for this reference. I find both the King and the queen very fascinating. The queen had certainly stolen a march over her husband. I read that 'Her heart was entombed at the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Nancy (Lorraine).'
     
  3. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1346 Margarine
    There is a well-known Tamil saying that what we have learned is only the size of a handful of sand whereas what we are yet to learn is of the size of the world. You are repeatedly proving it these days. Wikipedia ought to be thankful to you for driving me from time and again to it to pursue the leads given by you.
    The margarine story immensely interested me and more so this picture:
    [​IMG]
    Margarine advertising, 1893
     
  4. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1347 Chesebrough
    The Vaseline man was a legend. Sir Robert Chesebrough passed away at the age of 96. That’s 25 years longer than the average life expectancy of 61.7 years in the U.S. at that time. What greater certificate is needed to realise the greatness of this man. Chesebrough Manufacturing Co. merged with Pond's Extract Company to form Chesebrough-Ponds, Inc. Have a look at the Patents they possess
    What a visionary he was!
     
  5. Novalis

    Novalis Gold IL'ite

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    Follow-up from last week:

    Finished reading A Million Words and Counting by Paul Payack. The chapter "The personal is political" filled with references of critical offences interested me.

    • Gender activists lobbying to complement History with Herstory and respell 'woman' as 'womyn'.
    • Flip chart being ethnic slur to Filipinos.
    • A customer not served black coffee believed to be racist till he worded his order as "coffee without milk".
    • Terrorist too disconcerting hence a softened 'misguided criminals' to alert public.
    • Brainstorm in corporate-speak offensive for participants with brain disorders such as epilepsy, hence an artsy 'Word shower'. (Let's summon a word shower in the meeting room!)
    • The word "failure" too devastating for pupils who should be orientated with "deferred success" after winning no prize.

    Finally, 'incurious' over every incarnation of idiocy. People are just naively incurious but not upfront stupid and annoyingly idiotic anymore. Here at QPQ we can never be incurious about anything.
     
  6. Novalis

    Novalis Gold IL'ite

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    On reading the interview of Audrey Sherman, I was delighted by her need for unobtainable goal.

    "I would say this – invention is a little spark that has to light, so never get discouraged.When I was first looking at a career as a corporate scientist, someone told me not to aim too high. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” he said. I looked at him and said, “I need to aim that high. I’ll only be disappointed if I don’t aim that high.” Always look for the farthest point – the goal you can’t even imagine yet – and aim there."​

    Aim for the goal you cannot imagine!

    Even the cliched 'aim for the stars to reach the moon' is senseful given our success might not be proportional to our ambition but is definitely coincidental with the ambition's prospect.
     
  7. Novalis

    Novalis Gold IL'ite

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    History has been unfair to unexceptional monarchs. If you didn't spiffy up your residence in lavish gardens or stole a rampage over your neighboring lordship, then you are a forgotten king.

    The signature pretense reminds me of an uncle in our family who is a raconteur. In his youth, he crafted an intricate signature like some calligraphic artwork on the ceilings of Constantinople which he finds extremely challenging to remember and replicate in his doddering infirmity now. Many times when his cheques are bounced back from incompatible signature, he requests the bank to show his original signature which the bank manager happily obliges given he is an old and trusted customer. Then he meticulously attempts to reproduce that indiscretion from his youth lamenting his self-aggrandizement of not opting for an easier signature.

    The king and queen seem to be prudent in upholding austere signatures unlike my uncle who considers his signature a Lepakshi ink artwork.
     
  8. Novalis

    Novalis Gold IL'ite

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    Last night I read "Physics of the Impossible" by Michio Kaku.

    upload_2019-6-4_16-47-40.png

    While the book touched upon the far-fetched impossibility of fanciful undertakings like teleportation and time-travel, I was engrossed in reading about lie detector, rather the first lie detector invented in India.

    The story goes ...the accused of a crime was locked up in a room with a magical donkey. The suspect was instructed to pull the donkey's tail. If the magical donkey had talked, the suspect was found guilty but if the donkey stood pat in silence, the suspect was freed. The juridical trickery is that the donkey's tail is coated with soot. Only the guilty would refrain from pulling the tail thus sootless on examination implicating their crime.

    You might have guessed by now why this legend suspended me in rapt attention.

    A donkey!

    Why is the shill in this trickery a donkey? Would a cat's or a cow's tail be repulsive to tug?

    Somehow the premise is that a donkey would be amenable for a retributive tug.

    In any case, I am glad that our enamoured donkey features so much in folk tales and heroic tales and now in primordial tales of earliest jury-rigged (pun!) inventions.
     
  9. Novalis

    Novalis Gold IL'ite

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    I recently chanced on the original saying of Occam's razor popularly expressed as "don't overcomplicate things".
    Original saying: "A plurality is not to be posited without necessity"

    Is that even self-consistent in uttering a simple notion with much complexity. A plurality what ???
     
  10. Cheeniya

    Cheeniya Super Moderator Staff Member IL Hall of Fame

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    1352 Great names of the past
    I must touch upon W H Auden again. He certainly fits in with your statement. Thanks to the popular 1994 movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, thousands of people who had probably never read a word from poet W. H. Auden have been exposed to his work. In one scene, a character eulogizes his companion by reciting Auden’s “Funeral Blues” for the other mourners.
    These words of his poem kill me:
    "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
    Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
    Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
    Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. "

    "The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
    Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
    Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
    For nothing now can ever come to any good."
     

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