Daily Gyaan

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

-- Richard Bach
Illusions

Everyone has to have some experience to assure himself life is worth living.

-- Johannes Brahms (1833-97), Composer

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

-- Aristotle

"My parents really sacrificed to get me to college."

"They worked hard?"

"When I was a baby, they abandoned me on the Dean's front porch."

-- From the comic strip "Wizard of Id"

-- Enrico Fermi

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

-- Isaac Asimov

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

-- Mark Twain

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago

-- Bernard Berenson

The Pumpkin and the Glass Slippers Department

It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day-to-day basis.

-- Margaret Bonnano

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.

-- St. Augustine

Happy Birthday Dude! 

A diplomat... is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.

-- Caskie Stinnett

If hanging a man in effigy would produce the same salutary impression of terror upon the minds of the people, it would be folly or cruelty ever to hang a man in person.

-- Jeremy Bentham,
Principles of Penal Law

eat popcorn!
Imagine the power of an advertiser who could put persuasive thoughts into your mind without your conscious awareness! This is the idea behind so-called "subliminal" advertising. According to some popular accounts, movie theaters can sneak frames into the move that flash, "eat popcorn," and the audience, supposedly unaware of having read this message, will comply and buy more popcorn. The idea is that the message is displayed for such a short period of time that the viewer does not have time to consciously process it, and so is therefore not consciously aware of having ever seen the message. According to proponents of this idea, the viewer will nonetheless process the message at some level below consciousness and thereby act upon it.
[ http://www.sykronix.com/researching/tscope.htm ]



tachistoscope
[Etymology: Greek Tachistos, very rapid, fr. Tachys, rapid, + skopeo, to view]

- An apparatus that projects a series of images onto a screen at rapid speed to test visual perception, memory, and learning.
[The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition]

- A tachistoscope is a device that displays (usually by projecting) an image for a specific amount of time. It can be used to increase recognition speed or to show something too fast to be consciously recognized. The actual tachistoscopes use a slide or transparency projector equipped with the mechanical shutter system typical of a camera. The slide is loaded, the shutter locked open, and focusing and alignment are adjusted, then the shutter is closed. When ready for the test, a shutter speed is selected, and the shutter is tripped normally.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachistoscope ]

Two American tourists are driving through Wales. At Llanfairpwllgwyn-gyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogoch, they stop for lunch and one of them says to the waitress, "Before we order, could you please settle an argument for us? Would you please pronounce where we are very slowly."

The girl leans forward and drawls, "Burrrrrgurr Kiiiing."

A shattered illusion is a sorrowful experience; but a life without illusion is a sorrowful life.

-- Jose Narosky

The 20-20 Hindsight Principle

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

-- Soren Kierkegaard

In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are.

-- Nicholas Chamfort

When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two
equals four.

-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg,
scientist and philosopher

The This-is-how-we-do-it Department

Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.

-- Barbara Tober

The Time-Flies-When-You're-Having-Fun Department

So little time and so little to do.

-- Oscar Levant

Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

-- Harry S. Truman, 33rd US president (1884-1972)