Logicomix

I am pleasantly surprised to learn about Logicomix, a graphic novel based on the life of Bertrand Russell and his search for logical certainty in mathematics, also featuring many other great philosophers of his time. Here is a well-written review of the comic book at The New York Times. Below is an excerpt from the book, taken from the same link, showing a discussion between Russell and Wittgenstein:

Sex and Marriage

There is an undesirable consequence of allowing sex only within marriage (there might be many desriable consequences too; they are however not the topic of this post) and that is: a significant number of people wish to get married just to have sex. The fact that marriage would also entail having to support a family and fulfill social obligations appears as a "side-effect" of the process to many, while those too madly in love may not even give due thought to it. The result: couples get married driven by sexual passion, and mentally unprepared for the demands of a married life in a Pakistani society.

Bertrand Russell writes in Marriage and Morals:

"Certain it is that when people marry without previous sexual knowledge of each other and under the influence of romantic love, each imagines the other to be possessed of more than mortal perfections and conceives that marriage is going to be one long dream of bliss. This is especially liable to be the case with the woman if she is brought up ignorant and pure, and therefore incapable of distinguishing sex hunger from congeniality... she may easily marry the first man who awakens her sexually, and find out too late that when her sexual hunger is satisfied she has no longer anything in common with him... the result has been an extreme prevalence of divorce and an extreme rarity of happy marriages."

When a believer and non-believer fall in love

What happens when a believer and non-believer fall in love and get married? In this insightful article here, Dr. K. Sohail explains how this relationship proceeds in three stages of Honeymoon, Conflict and Decision-Making, the third stage ending in one of three possibilities: a healthy resolution, divorce or an unhappy marriage. Dr. K. Sohail then goes on to show that the outcome does not depend on what religious/philosophical ideology the persons in the relationship actually hold, but rather on their types of personalities. A recommended read.

Cross-posted on Bazm-e-Rindaan

Comfort of Illusory Order

"She felt about people who believed in the morality of their nations exactly as she felt about those who believed in religion: it was baffling, it seemed to defy all reason, and yet she would never be the one to attempt to wrestle the comfort of illusory order away from someone else."

Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows

Business

Aati: How would you like your religion, sir? Frozen or thawed? Ready-to-fry or easy serve? Will you have it here or to go? Paper bag or plastic? Thank you, come again please. We have a special tomorrow, two for the price of one. Hah, hah. And the point of that is, religion in the 21st century is everyone's business. Even more than it used to be. Literally business for quite a few.

What is Poetry

"Poetry at its most basic level is about the movement of the mind. This is why it is translatable, even from a language such as Chinese, which has very little in common with English. What can be translated is the leap from one thought to another: what I call the associative movement particular to poetry. That leap, that movement, is what makes poetry poetry."

Matthew Zapruder, Off The Shelf: Finding the pieces that turn writing into poetry

Origins of Modesty

"William James believed that modesty was not instinctive but acquired: women had found that generosity breeds contempt, and they had transmitted the findings to their daughters. Diderot went further back, and traced it to the jealousy of husbands, whose sense of ownership led them to enforce modesty upon their wives. In many tribes only the married women are clothed, their husbands (wiser than the creator of Penguin Isle) believing this to be an aid in the maintenance of property rights. When purchase replaced capture as the fashionable mode of marriage, and parents found that chaste daughters brought the highest price, they virtuously encouraged modesty."

Will Durant, The Pleasures of Philosophy

Hot Crazy Scale, How I Met Your Mother

Mental Health

The characteristics of mental health as given in Oxford Handbook of Clinical Specialties by Judith Collier, Murray Longmore, Mark Brinsden and can be found online here at Google

Going Twilight

Going Twilight. verb. A expression used when one's girlfriend starts acting whiny, clingy, insecure, neurotic, paranoid, obsessive, idealistic, suicidal, and becomes delusional about the ways boyfriends are supposed to look and act.

Example: "Stop it! You are going all Twilight on me now!"

Awais Aftab's Dictionary of Stray Phrases © 2009

Screwed Up

Me studying Pathology...

Me: Does a hydatidiform mole have a soul?
Saad: How screwed-up your brain must be to have given a thought to something like that.

Lolz.

Cryptic Thoughts 2

X: To believe in a specific God of a specific religion on the basis of faith alone is like believing that infinity multiplied by zero has only one answer and that is, say, 192.

Creation

This is the trailer of a new movie Creation based on the life of Charles Darwin. I'm really looking forward to watching it.

Control

An invasion of privacy confers the greatest power of control to any authority.

Being Fabulous and Obsessed

Behind every freakin' fabulous blog is ... guess what ... an obsessed mind!

Salman Latif has kindly awarded me the freakin' fabulous award, tagged with the rules that i have to divulge five of my current obsessions to the world, and then pass on the award to five other fabulous blogs. Okay, here we go.

My Five Current Obsessions

1) Mafia Wars: Its an online browser game on Facebook which is about establishing and expanding your criminal empire. It is an efficient way to waste time, and it can get pretty addictive.

2) A particular girl: Self-explanatory :P

3) Dollhouse: A sci-fi action tv series which did not get as much popularity as it deserved. Welcome to a world in which the minds of people can be wiped clean and imprinted with a new set of personality, which may be some real copy or may be artificially designed. A corporation named Dollhouse offers these imprinted 'dolls' to the filthy-rich clients, imprinting them with whatever personality is asked for. The series follows a particular Dollhouse establishment and an FBI agent who is trying to uncover it.

4) Grey's Anatomy Soundtrack: The show has featured some pretty cool songs.

5) Deviant Art: A website for art fans to share their work and browse through others'; it also caters to literature and photography. Have been visiting it a lot lately.

Five Fabulous Blogs

There are many fabulous blogs i know of, but most of them wouldn't care for such an award, lolz, so i will try to short list those fabulous blogs whose authors would be likely to continue on this tradition :)

1) Writing for Life by Raaji
2) The View from behind my Specs by Specs
3) Abyss of Human Mind by Qasim Aziz. Our very own Nietzsche of the blogosphere!
4) Bain-marie: The Double Boil by Saad Javed
5) Fish Pool by Mayhem. I know Salman has already given you the award, but well, you'll just have to do it again. The price of being fabulous :P

The Perishers - Never Bloom Again

I know we'll grow, but we'll never bloom again
I'm sure we'll grow, but we'll never bloom again.

Would he?

"Had he known that he was about to enter a tunnel whose only egress was his own annihilation, would he have turned away?

Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
Who can tell?"

Arundathi Roy, The God of Small Things

Roses

Aati: Roses don't land twice before the feet that trample them.

Irony

Click to enlarge

This is the opening paragraph of an article which appeared today in Jang Newspaper, and can be viewed at this link. It is ironical to note, apart from being outraged, how the author begins by praising the injunction to respect other religions and then goes on to violate that very injunction.

Cryptic Thoughts

X: Last time i broke up, i saw God. This time, i see an abyss.

Girl as Nude

1) 2)
3) 4)

Girl as Nude
(source)
by B. Sullivan
from deviantART

You are in your Picasso mood
again
soft nude blues
and sharp grey
angles
confuse me.
I like you better
as Van Gogh
daft as a brush
sipping absinthe
while you dance on tables;
or maybe Gauguin,
curving under a palm tree,
full and nut brown -
your breasts
flirting against my shirt;
or Monet,
floating on lilies -
your mouth
that kind of red
I want to devour

(posted with author's permission)

Paintings:
1) Blue Nude by Pablo Picasso
2) Still Life with Absinthe by Vincent van Gogh
3) Tahitian Woman by Paul Gauguin
4) Nymphéas by Claude Monet

Heaven

Aati: Heaven defined would probably be heaven lost.

Me: We don't really know what would make us eternally happy; heaven is undefined bliss.

[Btw, today is Aati's birthday. Three cheers for Aati, for being the exquisite goddess that you are.]