Those Little Bits

If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I’ll feel I have lost Apple.

- Steve Jobs resigning from Apple in 1985. Via Popular Science.

The disposable tendencies of our culture go beyond the tangible. Old software is abandoned and left to die, its usefulness spoiled by incompatible updates. Pop music is produced not for long-lasting relevance, but for evanescent popularity. Entire media organizations are built on producing cheap, fleeting content that will attract momentary attention and then be forgotten, left to rot in cyberspace in digital landfills, engulfed by the next round of valueless “content.” Tweets are hastily written and released like post-it notes in the wind, most being relevant for a moment (if that) before joining the growing mass of irrelevant, out-of-context and mostly useless digital detritus. Creation is driven not by a desire to create something of lasting value, but by desperate lust for the short-lived benefits of evanescent attention. Pageviews and profit.

- Surat Lozowick Via What Blag

(Source: suratlozowick.com)

As Time Magazine proclaimed in 2005, there’s a new breed of ‘twixters’ who seem trapped betwixt and between adolescence and adulthood. The cover describes them as “young adults who live off their parents, bounce from job to jon, and hop from mate to mate. They’re not lazy…they just won’t grow up.

- From: The Art of Choosing
By: Sheena Iyengar

Whether considering outcomes worthy of praise or of blame, those from the individualistic society assigned responsibility to one individual, while the collectivists saw the outcomes as inextricably linked to systems and context.

- From: The Art of Choosing
By: Sheena Iyengar

In arranged partnerships, marital bliss is primarily gauged by the fulfillment of duties, while for love marriages the major criteria is the intensity and duration of the emotional connection between two people. Whether people are consciously aware of this or not, their feelings and the consequences of those feelings follow from the assumptions they have about how married life must unfold.

- From: The Art of Choosing
By: Sheena Iyengar

The only freedom deserving the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, as long as we do not deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it…..Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

- John Stuart Mill

It is a mistake to imagine that slavery pervades a man’s whole being; the better part of him is exempt from it: the body indeed is subjected and in the power of a master, but the mind is independent, and indeed is so free and wild, that it cannot be restrained even by this prison of the body, wherein it is confined.

- Seneca the Younger

As I often say, for instance, our faith in astrology does not decrease as a result of rising levels of our scientific education; rather, as a consequence, we effortlessly move to computerized horoscope casting!

- About Indians by Rama Bijapurkar
From: We are like this only

Every philosophy is disguised autobiography.

- Sudhir Kakar