Alive

Monday, April 21, 2014

Is it demotivating to have a shirker in your team? If a company neither appreciates a work of merit neither condemns a shirker, is it in peril? There are always inspiring people and there are not so role models.
While talking about this at a get together, a mention od Gallup study of the percentage of disengaged employees in the US workforce got me to Disengaged employees cost millions

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Plato at the Googleplex

The Meaning of Meaning

Thought experiment of being surgically connected to a famous violionist for nine months.
If you were a violonist or valued music, you wouldnt mind. So it has to be something of value for you to forgo your life. So its the person who has something to give up that has the right to decide if what they are making is of value according to them.

The invisible organ

Antibiotics is something which we are very familiar with. I once heard from a colleague that he became lactose intolerant after taking antibiotics. Hearing from others of a 10 day course that the doctor put them on, it seems like they are on a strange journey. NOR too always has an interesting tidit about how much the microbiome in you weighs. Since its an ubiquitous topic, the subject of the book is very easy to relate to second-hand. If you think you havent taken it, then quarter into the book, you will realise its not so with the current food growing techniques.
Author Martin Blaser has used good foreshadowing techniques to maintain the interest of reader in his journey of H Pylori research and results. I do not think the appendix in any book has interested me so much that I had to maintain a bookmark for the appendix too while reading the book.

Shingles - Latency
Differences in microbe sof an infant depending if the birth was natural or Caesarian.
In Rome, women mostly have one kid, something I was surprised to learn at party.
Modern medicine may not be doing your microbiome any favors
Prebiotic nutrition

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Sports and Games of the Medieval Cultures

Ashta Kashta (Ashta Chemma)
congkak (Vamana gunthalu)

The Matsya Puranam

Matsya puranam

A Philosophy of Walking

I love walking. A book on it - 'A philosophy of Walking' by Frederic Gros is welcome.
soon I realised that another major focus of the book is writers, my another favourite subject.

Delays in traffic jams got me started walking. Soon I got comfortable enough to stretch my walks to test how far I could go. Even though its such and individual, personal task. The author has made various thinkers and their philosophy of walking as the centerpiece of book. The only author in this book, I knew was big on walking - Thoreau. This book has great vignettes of writers and poets whom you know only so much reading up their bio. They become flesh through their feelings during walking.

"Lastly, you are not alone because when you walk you soon become two". This sums up the self-company of walking. As I kept reading, I kept thinking of the various places that I was hiking and the feelings talked about in the book.

The freedom to be

Reference to A Night Among the Pines of

Gyrovagues
Peyote walk
Homo Viator

Time in the philosphy of Gabriel Marcel

Monday, April 14, 2014

Amber Teething Necklace

Amber teething necklaces do they work

When a bowl breaks

In the daze of morning cleaning
I set a washed brown ikea bowl
bought as is
on an inverted black pan
relegated to egg boiling
I woke up to the
sound of shards

Can I put it back
like a wooden egg puzzle
or by Kintsugi
The golden Repair

The brown bowl revealed
the ivory within