For sale: baby shoes ...

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained in us than lying to others
~ Dostoevsky

Brain Implants Allow Paralyzed Monkeys To Walk Slashdot

Moment former deputy mayor Salim Mehajer is handcuffed by Spanish police in Ibiza after a dispute with a taxi driver over him eating in a cab

·        50 Smartest Companies 2016

All art is based upon nonconformity [and] every great historical change has been based upon nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists. Without nonconformity we should have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Charta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions. All that is pretty obvious.

But it seems to be less obvious somehow that to create anything at all in any field, and especially anything of outstanding worth, requires nonconformity, or a want of satisfaction with things as they are. The creative person — the nonconformist — may be in profound disagreement with the present way of things, or he may simply wish to add his views, to render a personal account of matters.

PRICELESS, BREATHTAKING, SPEECHLESS... Inner Life of a Cell 

Oral History of Cells ;-)

I know that this is an old story, but bad ideas die hard and you can never have too much research refuting them.

This time researchers have shown one of the downsides of giving everyone a trophy. That is, of puffing up children’s self-esteem, telling them they are great, regardless of whether they are.

The Wall Street Journal reports on what happens when you make it that children always win:

Letting children always win games and competitions may give them a false sense of self-confidence that could interfere with learning, suggests a study in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

“I have been obsessed by books all my life, and now I feel the melancholy that I suppose old artisans must once have felt when their trade became industrialised. All these years I have been on the wrong, or at least losing, side of history, a dinosaur that did not foresee its extinction.”

Your Boss Has To Give You Time Off To Read, According To United Arab Emirates’ New Literacy Law

What’s more, every newborn’s family will get a “knowledge briefcase,” taxes will be eliminated on publishing, and it will be illegal to destroy books. (So now we know where to send all those copies of Fifty Shades of Greythat secondhand bookstores won’t take.)

On bibliotherapy. Novels are hardly cures for our life problems. Books drive people to do strange things. They don’t solve problems, they create new ones  

Two of America’s greatest musicians- listen and fall in love with music that will stay with you a lifetime: A century-defining album’s improbable genesis “…The first of three successful collaborations between Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, “Ella and Louis” is nearly perfect. It is one of those works of art — and they don’t come along often — that seems to have always existed. It features two of the greatest artists the century produced: Armstrong, the innovator and ambassador of jazz, and Fitzgerald, its most gifted singer

music by Vincent Youmans and lyrics by Irving Caesar written for the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette: I want to be happy
But I won't be happy
Till I make you happy, too

Life's really worth living
When we are mirth-giving
Why can't I give some to you?

When skies are gray
And you say you are blue
I'll send the sun smiling through

I want to be happy
But I won't be happy
Till I make you happy, too

I'm a very ordinary man
Trying to work out life's happy plan
Doing unto others as I'd like to have them
Doing unto me

Now when I find a very lonely soul
To be kind becomes my only goal
I feel so much better when I tell ‘em my philosophy

I want to be happy
But I won't be happyTill I make you

·        Alberto Gallo: "Somewhere in Austria, a Treasury Employee Is Laughing"

Death Of Vine’s Six-Second Videos Is The Death Of An Art Form

“Like flash fiction before it, best represented by the apocryphal Ernest Hemingway six-word story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” the original six-second limitations on the app’s videos forced users to craft concise narratives that capture a slice of life or create a bit of movie magic in a mere moment. It became flash film.”

… Bob Dylan: Oracle and Iconoclast - WSJ: 

The collected lyrics make the primary case for Mr. Dylan’s achievement. But “Chronicles” (2004), the first volume of Mr. Dylan’s projected three-volume memoirs, offers a valuable window into the writer’s brain. “Truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn’t want it in my house,” he wrote of trying to compose songs. “Oedipus went looking for the truth and when he found it, it ruined him. It was a cruel horror of a joke. So much for the truth. I was gonna talk out  of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing. If I ever did stumble on any truth, I was gonna sit on it and keep it down.”