Nice car!

Here's the car of the future! Not sure if this would take-off but looks pretty cool...!

Are you lucky?

Here's what Michael Shermer of Scientific American has to say about it.

"Wiseman gave subjects the "big five" personality scale, which measures "agreeableness," "conscientiousness," "extroversion," "neuroticism" and "openness." Although there were no differences between lucky and unlucky people on agreeableness and conscientiousness, Wiseman found significant differences for extroversion, neuroticism and openness."

Shermer makes a reference to Lou Gehrig. If you are like me and don't know who Lou Gehrig was, here's his wiki page! Pretty inspirational character!

Sixth sense

Here's a link to an amazing new technology! It decouples you from the computer yet enables you harness the full power of the web real time in a very intuitive and an elegant manner. This, when commercialized, will be a huge thing.

And here's the website of the genius who designed it.

My Genome, My Self - NYT Article

Here's Steven Pinker's article that appeared in the NYT on Personal genomics. And here's a direct-to-consumer company that interprets you genetic information for about $100.

And below are some interesting excerpts from the article

"The very fact that I had to think so hard brought home what scholars of autobiography and memoir have long recognized. None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story.

An obvious candidate for the real answer is that we are shaped by our genes in ways that none of us can directly know. Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

This genetic roulette must be even more significant in an organism as complex as a human, and it tells us that the two traditional shapers of a person, nature and nurture, must be augmented by a third one, brute chance.

Direct-to-consumer companies are sometimes accused of peddling “recreational genetics,” and there’s no denying the horoscopelike fascination of learning about genes that predict your traits. Who wouldn’t be flattered to learn that he has two genes associated with higher I.Q. and one linked to a taste for novelty?

It is a question of the most perspicuous level of analysis at which to understand a complex phenomenon. You can’t understand the stock market by studying a single trader, or a movie by putting a DVD under a microscope.The fallacy is not in thinking that the entire genome matters, but in thinking that an individual gene will matter, at least in a way that is large and intelligible enough for us to care about."

Can we avoid aging?

That's what Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey seems to think. Here's the link to a very interesting and provocative speech given by him at TED

But to be fair to the speech, it is not as much as about avoiding aging but more so about extending lifespan. It is a truly a very interesting question.

Most of medical research is about extending lifespan by preventing or curing diseases. But if the onset of diseases can be delayed, especially those considered to be inevitable due to hereditary or life-style reasons, would that extend life? I'm not talking about exercise etc but real medication that healthy people take to delay a disease that they are most likely to be afflicted with in the future! The results may not overtly radical, but something to think about. Enjoy the speech for now.

btw, with his long beard, Aubery de Grey looks like wizard out of LOTR. Wonder when he'll become Aubery de White?

The Moral Instinct

Bertrand Russell wrote, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell.”

This is an excellent essay by Steven Pinker on the Moral Instinct.

1.6180339887498948482045868.......

The title is not some gibberish. On the contrary, it is the most amazing number in the world. In fact, it is so mysterious that some people even have atoned it Godly status. It is not for nothing that it called the Golden Ratio or the Divine proportion.

Read this article that appeared in The Guardian and you'll know what I mean. For those interested in a Mathematical Explanation, you can read it here at Mathworld's website. Understandably, people have been fascinated by this number for a very long time and this website contains some very interesting history about the Golden Ratio.

I was more than amazed when I first stumbled across this number. It seems that in all the apparent chaos that the world seems to be in, there actually exists an underlying order. An order that we are not aware of or may be something that we know, yet dont recoginize! This number definitely provides food for some philosophical thought.

Obviously, lots of books have been written about it. Mario Livio's book, The Golden Ratio : The Story of PHI, the Worlds Most Astonishing Number, seems to be extremely interesting. One of the book's reviewers said that Livio leads us through innumerable examples of the golden number in the book - examples as varied as the breeding patterns of rabbits to optics of light rays - where the same golden ratio appears again and again and finally Livio asks the question, "Is God a Mathematician?" I intend to read the book as soon as possible and will let you all about it - if I feel like it!

Before I warp this post, this is by far the most accurate calculation of the golden ratio I found. A never-ending number indeed!