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There’s a Seinfeld for that
Philosophy, my field of study as an undergraduate, has fallen on hard times of late, and I don’t understand why, given that it is the foundation of every academic discipline; it is the ‘Ph’ in PhD (which stands for “doctor of philosophy”). So your professor with a doctorate in Chemistry actually is a “doctor of…
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Good
You know the way it goes. You project. You anticipate. You plan. And then, at the risk of personifying an immaterial concept, fate has a hearty laugh in your face. It’s the idea that nothing ever goes as you expected (or wanted) it to. The ancient Stoics were a clever bunch. They realized fate’s capricious…
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Golden Years
In a few months, I will turn 60. 60 !! It is already weighing on me. I breezed through the other life milestones without giving their significance much thought because my mind was elsewhere. At 40 I was too busy having the mid-life crisis that landed me in a wheelchair to have a proper mid-life…
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It all started with Ranjit’s legs
The first computer program I wrote was called ROLO. That’s not entirely true, because in high school I’d written a program that did nothing but print my name out on the screen ten times to demonstrate to Mr. Rodgers, the Computer Science teacher, my grasp of the concept of “iteration” using a for-next loop. It…
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Schopenhauer’s Poodles
The 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, an influence on Nietzsche and a contemporary of Hegel, was known for his philosophical Pessimism. I should explain. To a student of Philosophy, pessimism does not mean negativity or expecting the worse; rather, it is an outlook that views the world as aimless and our existence as one of…
Your mileage may vary.