What if you are not the object of dreams?

About the time that Dream Girl was released was also when I started looking at the world that eventually has brought me to where I am now.

No, I don't mean to suggest in any way that I owe my American life to Hema Malini; be patient and read on!

It was back in my early teenage years, which now seems like it was a previous birth, that I was, as a classmate described much later in life, "besotted" with a girl.  No, not with Hema Malini, dammit!  Why are you so obsessed with Hema Malini? ;)

My feelings were directed towards a smart and beautiful classmate of mine.

It was also about the same time that I started thinking about life in ways that made me question a number of different of things all around me.  Discussing love and life cemented my friendship with a classmate, who later became a wandering Indian in his one way.

One of the challenging questions that we could not understand was why we felt attracted to whoever it was.  And, therefore, the other side of the coin, as far as I was concerned: What if I were nothing but an ugly pile who could not, and would not, attract anyone?

Think about the old historical paintings and sculptures and stories.  Do the wealthy ever pay good money for paintings of unattractive people?  Wait, are there any old portraits of unattractive people?  Full disclosure: No artist or photographer as ever asked me to be a model! ;)

So obsessed we humans are that we make fun of the unattractive!  Like how American comedians routinely joked, and continue to joke, about British teeth.  If you have been to California and looked at all those beautiful men and women with their perfect teeth that are sparkling white, you know why the jokes are always about the Brits.

If all that was back then, the pressure is even worse now in the age of Instagram.

 Plenty of Indian women, and men too, vigorously scrub themselves with creams and lotions that are marketed to make them supposedly beautiful from their less attractive dark selves.  There are hair transplants for us bald and balding men because bald is ugly. We short people are ugly.

We ugly people are then forever trying to fit in, it seems like.

I have always wondered if whether it was  bunch of unattractive people like me, but fortunately endowed with thinking brains, who came up with platitudes like "beauty is skin deep" or "what's is inside is what really matters."  Keep in mind that the patron-saint for us ugly but thinking people--Socrates--was not handsome by any means ;)

Socrates, my man!

I could be wrong, ... but ...

To a large extent, I felt  smacked around into being intellectually humble when I started graduate school. I was amazed at how much had already been said and written about, and I became convinced that I had nothing to offer.  What the heck could I think about that the great minds had not already thought about?

I was an easy convert to "I don't know a damn thing!"

I became convinced, very easily, that my work would not be about uncovering anything dramatic.  No patent or copyrights.  My intellectual ego was quickly deflated.

In addition, I also became suspicious of people who came across as intellectually arrogant, as if they knew it all.  I started staying away from them.

When I started teaching, this understanding that we know very little is one that I have tried to get across to students without making that explicit all the time.  The subversive that I am, it has been mostly an implicit message.  Sometimes, through humor--like joking that the genius Einstein had no idea how to communicate in Tamil when even a three-year old kid in Tamil Nadu can do that ;)

Intellectual humility has always fascinated me.  I have even blogged about that here.  Like this one in 2012.  Or, like when I quoted Montaigne: Que sais-je?

A couple of years ago, I decided to offer a seminar on this subject.  I titled the course as "Intellectual boldness through intellectual humility."  In that, I essentially channeled my philosophy on education and life--to admit that I don't know.  The key, however, is to rise beyond that "I don't know."

Had I known about Benjamin Franklin's approach, I would have adopted that too: "whenever he was about to make an argument, he would open with something along the lines of, “I could be wrong, but…”

I offered that seminar in 2016 and, therefore, had no idea about this systematic attempt to understand intellectual humility:

in 2016, professors from Pepperdine University broke the concept of intellectual humility down into four components and published an assessment to measure them:

1. Having respect for other viewpoints
2. Not being intellectually overconfident
3. Separating one’s ego from one’s intellect
4. Willingness to revise one’s own viewpoint

An intellectually humble person will score high on all of these counts.

I am not sure whether boasting that I will score highly on these will be intellectually humble ;)

The author notes that "certain activities generally correlate with higher intellectual humility across the board":

Traveling a lot — or, even better, living for extended periods in foreign cultures — tends to make us more willing to revise our viewpoints. After all, if we know that it is perfectly valid to live a different way than we do, it makes sense that our brains would be better at accepting new approaches to problems at work. This aligns with recent research on the neuroscience of how storytelling helps us build empathy for other people. (Read neuroeconomist Paul Zak’s HBR article on this fascinating subject here.) Fiction readers tend to score higher in intellectual humility, perhaps because their brains are a little bit better trained to seek out stories that vary from their own, and see characters’ experiences and opinions as potentially valid. Preliminary research is also showing us that practicing mindfulness meditation, learning about the ins and outs of your own ego using a framework like the Enneagram, and learning about Moral Foundations Theory through programs like Open Mind Platform can each help us operate with more intellectual humility.

Readers of this blog, or the rare person who has paid attention to my remarks in the classes, will notice that these activities are also the activities that I talk up and practice.

I cannot understand how one could be anything but intellectually humble.  But then, to use Franklin's wise words, I could be wrong ;)

What comes next? Am I ready for it?

It might come across as strange that I spend a lot of time thinking about death, given how convinced I am that there is nothing after I die.  (Note: it is death. Not "resting peacefully" or any other crappy euphemism!!!)  To be so convinced that there is neither hell nor heaven nor any limbo-state pending resolution of my status is liberating.  I am not at all worried about the after.  I am only worried about the here and the now.  I am, therefore, worried about whether or not I am doing things that I won't have to regret about as I lay dying.

I have always believed that everybody wonders at the last stages whether they did alright and whether it was worth it.  Even if it was a sudden end to life, that fraction of a second, the dying person might contemplate that.  Death can strike us any second, which means that I better have my answer ready at all times.

The immanence of human finitude — the fact that we’re dying right now and not in some distant future — should create the impetus for philosophical reflection. Most philosophers know this in some abstract sense. The Platonic dialogues are set against the backdrop of the trial and death of Socrates for a reason: The difficulty of facing death is that it comes with the sudden challenge of giving a good account of your life, what Plato called an apologia.
When dying finally delivers us to our inevitable end, we would like to think that we’ve endured this arduous trial for a reason.

How can this not be a question that people try to answer every day?  Maybe we are arrogant, and we believe that death is far, far, away.  Or, maybe we are in extreme denial about death.  I cannot imagine either one to be a good approach to living one's short time on this planet.

When an old man asks, "What is the meaning of life?" he simultaneously queries the infinitely more particular question: "What is the meaning of my life?" Which is also the question: "What might be the meaning of my death?"
Any satisfying answers would have to address what this meaning might be from the inside, in terms that could be subjectively felt.

Nothing to disagree there.  The meaning is inside.  Indeed.  That is why I focus on death.  Not because I want to die--my posts make it very clear that I love life.  I love living.  The life that I love ends with death.  The end point of death is the destination. For me, and for you too.

In a wonderful essay, from where I had excerpted those quotes above, the authors ask, “Are we teaching students everything without teaching them anything regarding the big questions that matter most?”

It must be part of our jobs, as college teachers, to launch our students on the search for something larger than their immediate concerns, to confront them with the challenges that are presented by such intractable questions as the meaning of suffering, life, and death. "One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going," Goethe wrote elsewhere, and that’s a big hint. The elusiveness of knowing about life and death might be the point. Like falling in love, or even like remembering riding a bike, thinking about death might be the willingness to embrace what is unknown, what is unknowable. The cheerfulness displayed by that old skeptic Socrates in the face of death is apt for one wise enough to admit that he’s never known anything about the most important matters.

I don't think so.  Not because it is not our jobs.  In fact, I am convinced that it is.  One of the biggest reasons that I am offering a seminar course this term is precisely because I want students to be able to think above and beyond merely coursework and their immediate concerns.  However, we will be fooling ourselves if we think that students will truly latch on to understanding the importance of examining one's life.  As much as the larger population does not care, students too do not care.

There in lies the tragedy.  We all know we will all die.  But, we do not want to spend a good chunk of our time and energy into understanding our own existence.  Our "education" is about anything but this fundamental existential question.

Yes, in the face of life and death, all that knowledge amounts to nothing. Of course it does. The meaning of life and death is not something we will ever know. They are rather places we are willing or unwilling to go. To feel them, moment by moment, to the end, authentically, thoughtfully, passionately — that is an answer in itself.

Yes.

We need more philosophers. Not politicians!

Remember the presidential wannabe who seemed to want to only utter sound-bites like “we need more welders, less philosophers"?  Yes, I am referring to Marco Polo Rubio, who is now apparently "warming up to Donald Trump" after all the insults that he hurled at the Donald!  If only he had listened to the philosophers, because he would have understood that Plato had something to say about the dangers of democracy; Plato thought that:

 rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, in the wrong hands was dangerous and likely to be abused to appeal to people’s base motives. He foresaw the unethical, dishonest uses that a skilled but immoral speaker could put his persuasive powers to, with credulous people eager to believe or buy whatever he was selling.

Rubio will perhaps be shocked to learn that people who are familiar with the works of Plato and Socrates have quite a bit to say about Trump.   Kathleen Parker continues with this:

We at least owe Trump thanks for bringing these two ancient philosophers out of history’s woodwork and back into the conversation. Trump also has inspired reconsideration of rhetoric’s rightful place in the classroom, where it was once considered an essential component of “a gentleman’s” education. 

Andrew Sullivan, who suddenly abandoned blogging that he pioneered, has returned after a long hiatus at a new place, and in a lengthy piece on Trump, suggests that America has never been so ripe for tyranny.  Sullivan also brings in Plato and Socrates:

As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.”

Too bad that Rubio, Trump, and their ardent followers do not care about philosophy!  Sullivan and Parker are not some crazy hippies either.  More Sullivan:

Just as the English Civil War ended with a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, and the French Revolution gave us Napoleon Bonaparte, and the unstable chaos of Russian democracy yielded to Vladimir Putin, and the most recent burst of Egyptian democracy set the conditions for General el-Sisi’s coup, so our paralyzed, emotional hyperdemocracy leads the stumbling, frustrated, angry voter toward the chimerical panacea of Trump.

I particularly like the way Sullivan phrases the weight of the moment:

In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

I don't for a moment consider that as hyperbole.  In the American presidential politics, we often worry about a "October surprise" that can tremendously affect the election outcomes.  A terror attack committed by non-White foreign terrorists either on American soil, or on American interests abroad in early October, and Trump would seize that as his ultimate gift: "Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally."

It is going to be a long and scary wait until November 8, 2016.  Meanwhile, brush up on your Socrates, folks!

Career success doesn’t make you happy

If one read the autoethnographic posts in this blog from the time I began blogging, which was back in 2001 ... ok, you can't--I deleted them all in one stroke in 2007.  I then took a break, and restarted the blog in 2008.  If one read the autoethnographic posts since then, there is a good chance that a reader can put together a composite picture of who I am and what I value most and what I couldn't care for.  

Ever since my young adult years, I have been consciously making decisions in order to lead a life that makes meaning to me.  Meaning that cannot be measured in material terms.

While some might say I had no drive and am a failure, this blog itself is more than evidence that I am trying as much as I can to follow that old sage's advice not to lead a life that is not examined.

Thus, I was immensely pleased when I came across words that somebody else had crafted, which I could then make mine as well: "I'm in the twilight of a mediocre career."  I have been largely at peace with that because I have never intentionally and mindfully worked on progressing in a career anyway.

A career does not make a person.  It is irrelevant to who the human is.  Of the people I have quoted in this context in this blog, my favorite is Bill Watterson, whose creations always make me smile and think.  Watterson said:

having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

David Brooks, who is a couple of years older than me but has always sounded way, way older (!) has yet another book coming out.  In one of those pre-release interviews:

“I’ve far exceeded my expectations. But then you learn the elemental truth that every college student should know: career success doesn’t make you happy.” In midlife, it struck him that he’d spent too much time cultivating what he calls “the résumé virtues” – racking up impressive accomplishments – and too little on “the eulogy virtues”, the character strengths for which we’d like to be remembered.

Sooner or later, most--if not all--of us realize that a successful career is not by itself the source of happiness.  Happiness is one of those strange things that comes from within.  A blue sky with puffy white clouds makes us happy. The giggle of a four year old makes us happy.  A dog chasing his tail makes us happy.  A good time with friends makes us happy.  What the hell has a career got to do with all these, right?

In his latest column, Brooks projects his book against the upcoming end of the academic year ritual: the commencement:

Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?

Even that is unnecessarily complicated.  I way prefer the Bill Watterson bottom-line: go about inventing your own life's meaning as the route to your happiness; "you'll be happier for the trouble."   As simple as that.

My life as an exile. Am enjoying it though ;)

A few years ago, a senior faculty came to my office to talk with me. Not as a friend, not even as a colleague, but in his official capacity.  He  said that every institution has its own culture, and that there was a significant hallway culture where I was, and not working with that culture was how I ended up not socializing with my colleagues--including him, of course.

I certainly did not make him happy when I told him that slavery too was once a part of our culture, but that does not make slavery valid.  A few more exchanges, in which I was my calm discussing (not argumentative) self, and he left my office seemingly worse off in his moods than when he came to talk with me.

He wanted me to be a part of the community.  But, apparently he could not understand why I should differ from the groupthink.

A few months later, after reading an op-ed of mine, he emailed me:

Just as once you enjoyed exchanging ideas with your peers, couldn't this occur again? You have friends in the Division.  You can build from there.  In your conversation and writing, often your sense of humor triumphs over differences.  Your editorials likewise bridge ideologies.  Couldn't this happen in the Division as well?

What he failed to understand, perhaps because he did not want to accept it, is this: I had already been excommunicated and by his failure to speak against it, he was very much a part of the excommunication process.

It is a strange experience to be exiled even while being within.  Of course, things could be otherwise--with a welcoming atmosphere to discuss ideas, even when there is complete and total disagreement.  Or, I could have at least pretended to be a part of the community--but, I did not because, heck, I am too much an old-fashioned guy who loves Socrates as a role model.

Socrates turned himself into an outsider in his own city, but didn’t move to another. He became “átopos,” which meant “out of place,” but also “disturbing” and “perplexing.” Being átopos is crucial if you are to be a straight-talking philosopher, as Socrates was. There is in every community something that has to remain unsaid, unnamed, unuttered; and you signal your belonging to that community precisely by participating in the general silence. Revealing everything, “telling all,” is a foreigner’s job. Either because foreigners do not know the local cultural codes or because they are not bound to respect them, they can afford to be outspoken. To the extent, then, that philosophy is exposure of “everything,” especially of things no one wants to hear about, foreignness is highly necessary for its practice. The philosopher, at least the straight-talking kind, is bound to remain a metaphysical gypsy.

I could not, and cannot, be bothered with respecting the institutional culture when I did not agree with it.  An exile, thus, goes with the territory!

Socrates’ case is telling. Like few others he saw the philosopher’s need to uproot himself from his own community. Yet he refused to go into an actual exile himself, preferring instead a symbolic one. He lived in Athens as if he were a foreigner. This means that he practiced philosophy as a rather dangerous pursuit. Such a tightrope walking can never take you too far, especially when you, performing it with no safety net, make incessant fun of your audience.

Literally making fun of the audience, so to speak, is not one that I do all the time.  But, I do--only once in a while, though.  Like in this tweet from a few days ago:

Western Oregon University in the news. Three times! Awesome! Is there a fourth and a fifth too? https://t.co/SUJlBEiAOC #WOUNews #WOU
— sriram khe (@congoboy) August 11, 2014

All together, is it any wonder, then, that I have not gone far!  But, I could not tradeoff expressing my views on issues, even though I know well that there is a price to pay.

Truth-seeking and truth-telling are dangerous practices, especially with no safety net.  At least I have one net that has been holding me up.  I hope that net won't tear anytime soon ;)

The courage to be ignorant ... is an asset in education

In my classes, I often feel like I am re-enacting, over and over again, the wonderful scene from Life of Brian, which makes me laugh hysterically every time I watch it. What? You don't remember that scene? You have never watched that Monty Python classic?



I, too, routinely tell students that they don't need to come to classes, and that they don't need to take courses, and that universities aren't warehouses of information.  "You've got to think for yourselves" is what I keep emphasizing to them, while reminding them that thanks to the internet they have access to all the information they possibly need, and more.  "So, why do you think we have classes?" is a question I often ask students, who perhaps view that as some kind of a trick question.

But, there is always a thought in the back of my head that neither the students nor the folks at the university would care for such a message. The faculty and administrators of the university, any university, aggressively market higher education and their own respective institutions and they will not have any soft spot for me and my views on the overselling--not even mere selling--of higher education.

Even more is the worry that students, too, might not prefer to hear my bottom-line that they are individuals who need to think for themselves.  It shifts the responsibility, a burden, on to them.  It is a lot easier, perhaps, to simply do whatever one is told to do, especially where there is no genuine interest, than to take ownership for what they want to learn.  I don't blame them--the system has trained them well, as much as the system in which I grew up trained us really, really well.

Though in a different context, this essay notes parenthetically:

Socrates challenged such thinking in his day, and it did not end happily.

This, too, I often joke with students.  I tell them following Socrates means that one of these days I might be given the option of exile or death (though, given that I have already been exiled, a cup of tasty hemlock is no longer an option?  Haha!)

In this essay titled "The courage to be ignorant," which sounds like the title of my autobiography if I were to ever write one, there is practically nothing for me to disagree, even though it is in a context of art, music, and architecture:

classes consist in the delivery of scholarly knowledge that only serves to exacerbate the distance that the students feel from the material itself. Instead of learning how to look at an artwork or listen to a piece of music, students learn how to categorize them: this is early Renaissance, this is Impressionist....
The two skills don't have to be mutually exclusive, but on a practical level, they most often are — and I would rather that my students begin by gaining the confidence to analyze and respond to a work and only then delve into the historical and scholarly background according to their interest. We live in a time where there's no shortage of access to facts, but college may be their one chance to develop a real understanding of how art and music work.

Wait, there is more:

 It has pushed me to think more about holding students accountable for the ways they reach their own answers than about how best to give them — or Socratically help them stumble upon — the “right answer.” Even in classes where I bring much more to the table, the focus is and must be the material we're working on together, not all the information I'm bringing from the outside. More than that, though, all that information must be put to the test of the material itself, so that I always have to be open to the possibility that the interpretation I brought to the table is wrong, or at least not the whole story.

Should any of the current or former students make a mistake of reading this blog post, chances are that they will agree that this is very similar to what I, too, tell them.

The liberal arts approach in particular provides a unique opportunity to form broad-minded critical and creative thinkers who have the right combination of intellectual boldness and intellectual humility to enter a wide variety of professions and explore many bodies of knowledge. A crucial part of that formation is learning to have the courage to admit one's own ignorance, and I believe students would be better served if faculty members were more commonly called upon to display that same courage.

Imagine that!  Asking the egomaniacs that we academics are to admit that maybe we don't know it all. Hah!

The pleasure when students get educated ...

It is only three weeks into the quarter and, therefore, it is too early to celebrate, yes.  But, dammit, I am excited.  I am excited because it is clear that at least a few students are demonstrating that what we are trying to accomplish over the term's ten weeks is a lot more than merely the course contents and their eventual letter-grades.

The larger and nobler goal of liberal education is that even as we engage students with everything from economic geography to biology to literature, they would begin to use these to figure out for themselves the good life they would want to lead and the good and just society in which they would like to live.  And, thus, contribute to making the world a better place for all of us.

We accomplish that by questioning, especially within ourselves.

Thus, when students' essays include comments that reflect that internal inquiry, I get excited.  I am not referring to any youthful and anarchic dismissive statements, but constructive exercises.  While thinking about the economic transformation over the past couple of centuries, a student writes in an assignment:

Instead of taking advantage of what people before us did, we sit and watch television all day. ... I went home with a different mindset and started appreciating all the time I had to do homework, and when I thought I was getting bored I would just think of other activities to do because I should value the free time I have.

Even if the student has already forgotten this and has gone back to the old ways, isn't it fantastic that the light shone brightly for those couple of days?

Another student notes in the context of the complex web of interdependent economic interactions in the world:

A lot goes into making our world livable, but many don't understand or think about these conveniences.  Everyone should take an economic geography class so they too can understand how even small things are actually a big part of our world.

BTW, such opportunities to examine life won't be possible in a typical "test" scenario, especially when students have to merely bubble in their responses, right?  All the way from the K-12 system and into the undergraduate studies, our fascination with testing is simply killing learning.

I worry that students who have been brought up in a standardized testing environment will find it even more difficult to become thinkers and creative people.  I am quite convinced that I am beginning to see that already in my classes.

The gap in what students are expected to know between high school and college is often thought to be vast. A newly released survey quantifies just how wide it is.
Eighty-nine percent of high-school instructors described the students who had completed their courses as "well" or "very well" prepared for first-year, college-level work in their discipline. But only about one-quarter of college faculty members said the same thing about their incoming students. The gap was similar when the survey was last conducted, in 2009.

Even as I worry about all those, a few students like these easily convince me that the future will be in safe hands.  A future that, in a democratic society, will depend on citizens thinking about many, many important issues:

“When we ask about the relationship of a liberal education to citizenship, we are asking a question with a long history in the Western philosophical tradition. We are drawing on Socrates’ concept of ‘the examined life,’ on Aristotle’s notions of reflective citizenship, and above all on Greek and Roman Stoic notions of an education that is ‘liberal’ in that it liberates the mind from bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world.” –Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, 1998

We don't need fancy buildings with climbing walls to achieve these goals, right?

At the college where I did my undergrad
No liberal education there!

Socrates dead!

The Brazilian soccer star, thanks to whom even a football nincompoop like me stayed up late in the night to watch the World Cup, has died:

He had been in a critical condition with an intestinal infection since being admitted to intensive care on Friday at a hospital in Sao Paulo.
Socrates, who was widely regarded as one of the greatest ever midfielders, was moved onto a life support machine on Saturday.
He played in two World Cups, won 60 caps for his country between 1979 and 1986 and scored 22 goals.

The following is what I had blogged a year-plus ago:

All I remember from that World Cup was one name: Socrates.  It was a simply awesome tournament ... TV was just about being introduced then in the part of India where I lived, and it was the good ol' newspaper and radio that we had to work with.  I wonder if that made it all the more exciting, come to think of it ...

Guess what happened to Socrates?

Sócrates is a doctor of medicine, a rare achievement for a professional footballer (he is a graduate of the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto). Even rarer is the fact that he earned the degree while concurrently playing professional football. There are persistent rumours that Sócrates turned out for the University College Dublin. However, the player himself has denied this saying that he has never even been to Dublin^{[citation needed]}.
He is also noted for being an intellectual (he holds a doctorate degree in philosophy), a heavy drinker and smoker, and for his height (193 cm, 6 ft 4 in).

Dev Anand and Socrates on the same day :(

If only I didn't know about the harm from oil and natural gas ...

The morbid curiosity that has been a consistent and strong feature of who I am--right from when I was a kid--means that often I think life will be wonderful if only I were not curious. I wish for that blissful ignorance sometimes.  Those occasions when I think that Socrates was being hyperbolic about a life not examined.  That charlatan ought to have tried before he figured out anything--if only humans had Philip K. Dick's "precogs" who would have zoomed into Socrates' "precrimes."

Can't undo any damn thing, and I am stuck.  So are you, if you are reading this--the joke is on you now, isn't it!  Ha!!!  At least there are a few fellow travelers in this misery from knowing something.  Or, maybe that is the problem--knowing something about a lot, as opposed to knowing something only about a little bit.   

So, why all this you ask?  Watch this:



As always, the question this time of the year, when an academic term comes to a close which is when I discuss the environmental impacts of everything that we discuss throughout the term, well, the question is how much should I take my own emotions and pessimism to the classroom?  It can be so easy to become unhinged and rant like a bloody lunatic--after all, these are awfully important issues.  But then so are the events in Libya. In Pakistan. The veterans with PTSD in town. .... the list is endless.

There is only one way out of this--watch it:


In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

Yes, laughter is the best, maybe the only, way out!

Soccer mania: 1982, Brazil, and Socrates

All I remember from that World Cup was one name: Socrates.  It was a simply awesome tournament ... TV was just about being introduced then in the part of India where I lived, and it was the good ol' newspaper and radio that we had to work with.  I wonder if that made it all the more exciting, come to think of it ...
Here is a clip of one of those classic Socrates' goals from that tournament

Guess what happened to Socrates?

Sócrates is a doctor of medicine, a rare achievement for a professional footballer (he is a graduate of the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto). Even rarer is the fact that he earned the degree while concurrently playing professional football. There are persistent rumours that Sócrates turned out for the University College Dublin. However, the player himself has denied this saying that he has never even been to Dublin^{[citation needed]}.
He is also noted for being an intellectual (he holds a doctorate degree in philosophy), a heavy drinker and smoker, and for his height (193 cm, 6 ft 4 in).

Well, thinking about soccer, and Socrates reminded me of this Monty Python gem: Germany v. Greece :)