25 Nov

Detour: Democracy with Elanthirumaran

Elanthirumaran

I don’t invest much of time thinking about politics and governance.  I think they would take several years to master them.  I also think that because they are poorly documented, at least in India where I live, only a person in the middle of all this on a day to day basis can master them.

But today, I had an interesting insight into improving the quality of democracy in a meeting organized by a FaceBook group called Occum’s Saloon (since shut down).

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16 Nov

Meeting: Occum’s Saloon’s First Face to Face

Date: 2012 NOVEMBER 25 (SUNDAY)
Time: 10am to 2pm
Venue: AT JAMMI MIND SPACE, CHENNAI (map)

Participants in 1st Occum's Face to Face

Occum’s Saloon is a FaceBook group that discusses topics about de-cluttering our understanding of the world around us. For the first time, some of the members of the group are meeting in the brick-and-mortar world. The details of the even is available from this FaceBook Event Page.

Cost: Funded by the participants

Participants

Row 1: Ann Saravanan, Arunagiri Nallasivam, Balakrishnan Kasilingam, P. Elanthirumaran
Row 2: Narasimham Jammi, Kravmaga Sreeram, Raghunandan Rao, Saravanan Balakrishnan (me)
Row 3: Shobana Balachandran, Uma Raghavan, Veerappan

09 Nov

Little Bit of Madness

Starry Night, showing van Gogh's madness

4 out of 5 writers are known to have incidence of bipolar disorder in their family.  1 in 2 entrepreneurs are known to have ADHD spectrum disorder.  People are known to get powerful religious visions after epileptic seizures.

What is going on here?  Why haven’t these conditions go away from human gene pool, even though they usually are detrimental to the carrier’s ability to reproduce?

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06 Nov

Importance of Human Sexuality

Human Sexuality

We can’t understand human beings without understanding human sexuality.  Recently, I had a post that discussed the orgasmic potential in women.  It was well received by people I happen to know in real life.  Whereas, for the first time, I had people unsubscribing to the blog updates!  I thought I should explain why I keep straying into human sexuality every now and then.

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05 Nov

God, Evolution and Internal Compass

Internal Compass

Whenever a belief or an attitude is shared by all (or most) of humanity, it must have offered us a significant survival advantage in our evolutionary past.  After all, people without this belief/attitude were wiped off from the gene pool!

In an earlier post, I discussed about how our sense of spirituality is suspected to be an evolutionary by-product.  Scientists working on evolution suspect that our compulsion to subscribe to concepts like God and Life-Purpose might have similar evolutionary origins.

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02 Nov

What can OkCupid tell us about Women

In the very first post, I discussed how internet is becoming a very rich source for researchers on human behavior.  One such source is a online dating website called OkCupid.

OkCupid has a nice blog, where they keep publishing interesting pieces of researches, based on gargantuan sample size.  Compared to their studies, the regular University researches look laughably puny and homogeneous.

These are some of my favorite findings:

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