The serpent, the King, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.
- Chanakya in Arthashastra
Quote August 21, 2009
Have Some Perspective August 19, 2009
As promised. Quotes on the day I’m too lazy to blog:
The Total Perspective Votex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain–since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation–every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.
Trin Tragula–for that was his name–was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex–just to show her.
And into one end, he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other, he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
- Douglas Adams
If you don’t know which book it is, go read the series…
I wanted to follow up with some random bits of gyan but that would be kind of redundant, if you know what I mean.
ps: tarantismo, does this help with the sense of humour bit? 
Quote of the Day August 6, 2009
I decided to post a quote on days when I have nothing else to say. Here’s todays quote:
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
P. G. Wodehouse
Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.
P. G. Wodehouse
