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The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese

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Michael Paterniti

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“A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man!”

IgnoranceDeep ThoughtsMisinformationHumor InspirationalMisinterpretationMisinterpretedRichard FeynmanIgnoring IssuesAction Over ThoughtJudgmentalityTwo Sides To The StoryIncapable Of InterpretedIncapable Of Understanding
Author:Richard Feynman
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“One has to imagine a setting in a forest sometime as far back as 2000 BCE or earlier, where a sage, who has spent decades perhaps in the search for truth and wisdom, shares thoughts, most often elliptically, with a group of students eager to begin their own journey in unravelling the mysteries of life. The conversation is not in the form of a formal dialogue, but through parable and suggestion, story and allusion, or statements of deep penetrative insight into what constitutes the transcendent reality underlying our lives and this universe. What is significant is that while obviously having the role of a mentor, the guru is open to questions being asked and instead of delivering a monologue from a pedestal, is willing to have a conversation which is guided as much by what the guru has to say as by what is being asked by the shishya. Significant too is that what the sage says is not in the nature of a command, but more in the format of an insight, inviting discussion and interrogation. Considering the fact that for many Hindus (including Adi Shankaracharya), even though the Upanishads are seen as shruti or revealed texts, the fact that they were dialogic, and not prescriptive, set the tone for the further evolution of Hinduism itself. Other foundational texts of Hinduism carry forward this dialogic tradition. One of these is the Brahma Sutra by Badarayana written sometime around 450 BCE. In Indian tradition, Badarayana is identified with the legendary Vyasa who compiled the Vedas. The Brahma Sutra is known by many names—Nyaya Prasthana, because it puts the teachings of the Upanishads in a structured order; Vedanta Sutra, since it is a text on the Vedanta; Sariraka Sutra, since it deals with the nature and evolution of the embodied soul; and Uttara Mimamsa Sutra, since it deals with the final section of the Vedas, unlike the Purva Mimamsa which deals with the earlier sections.”

HinduismGuruDarshanasDialogic
Book:The Great Hindu Civilisation: Achievement, Neglect, Bias and the Way Forward
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“Godmind, Sonnet 2101 Come, look into my eyes, you'll smell the soil from Tabriz, chiming with the whirlwind of Konya. Come, peer into my endless abyss, fused with the fragrance of Bethlehem, you'll feel the breeze from Bodh Gaya. Don't be intimidated, just let it go, let the chaff of creed become compost. The vastness I live is the vastness in you, yet it seems alien, for you're grazing like cod. Nothing's out there except our image, whatever is there, is right here. Origin of universe is too stoic an undertaking, you just act human, right now and here. If boson is god particle of the universe, human is the god particle of society. Life is divine, when instrument of love, human is the heart particle of humanity.”

GodSpiritualityEnlightenmentHumanitarianMetaphysicsAdvaitaMonkTranscendenceGodlinessDivine Self
Book:The God Sonnets: Naskar Art of Theology
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“He obliterates things, she realized. He shatters them. They think they've won because he's a bit vague and he waffles, but that only goes so far. It's his shell, like a tortoise, if a tortoise was soft on the outside and dangerous on the inside. That's how the Time War ended: he got to the bottom of his patience, and he took two entire civilisations out of the universe and lock them away, and one of them was his own. That's how sharp his sense of obligation is. And he lives like that. He does it all the time.”

Doctor WhoThe DoctorThe Tenth DoctorLady Christina De SouzaBritish SpellingsThe Nature Of The DoctorThe Time War
Book:Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses
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“Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they'd evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings.”

PeopleHuman BeingsEvolutionMonstersAngelsLemonsThe DoctorFunny FacesHyper Intelligent BeesTiny Changes
Book:Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses
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