Fiction: Detective stories

• http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/detectives-are-the-new-shamans-and-priests/

Paintings: Impressionist

1. Monet, Cezanne
2. http://pinterest.com/kattalaiakilan/impressionism/
3. "The blurred imagery of Impressionist paintings seems to tickle the brain's amygdala, for instance, which is geared towards detecting threats in the fuzzy rings of our peripheral vision. Since the amygdala plays a crucial role in our feelings and emotions, that finding might explain why many people find these pieces so moving." -- http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528732.000-get-the-picture-art-in-the-brain-of-the-beholder.html?full=true

Application : Calibre

                                     A few years back, while there were rumours still Apple was considering options of using e-ink or not, being fed-up with having to boot laptop or a desktop to read PDFs and not being able to hold laptop in hand to enjoy reading lying on my back, I had got hold of an e-reader with the help of a friend returning from a tour in Europe,  after I had searched futilely for one in India. After shenagians to get the ereader to speak english, i had the ebook management software associated with the e-reader installed on my dekstop.Ughh, teh software started fighting me and on lookout for alternatvies found Calibre by googling (at mobileread forum) and have lived ever happily with Calibre.

• Get your own library at home with Calibre
• Conversion Galore using plugins: Calibre can help you convert your books to format your favourite reader understands (chm, cbz also included!). MS Doc support is not there, but you can mange by converting Doc to RTF, that Calibre can handle.
• Multiple Platform Support
• Multiple libraries
• Reading list using plugin
• Download your  RSS subscriptions as a book to your favourite reader periodically (use IFTT(https://ifttt.com/)  to send articles from your favourite blogs to Instapaper and download and have Calibre mail or sync the download of your Instapaper reading list article for offline reading)

News Paper : The Hindu

• Having a clear opinion and willing to persuade one to it with logic and reason
• Editorial
• Competition
• Reaping gold through cotton, and newsprint
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5s2gUWnkIY
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXLsi_Vmtw4
• 
  

Wonder : Signs

References :

1. Meaning      
• "Godel's work is to me the most beautiful possible demonstration of how meaning emerges from and only from isomorphism and of how any notion of direct meaning is  i.e. coddles meaning is incoherent. In brief it shows that semantics is an emerged quality of complex syntax" -- Metamagical Themas by Douglas R Hofstader
• "Modeling simple neural nets with a computer shows that these structures  automatically learn. One type of simple neural network is the three layer back propagation perceptron. This has an input layer, equivalent to the sense organs of an animal. These 'nerve cells' are connected to the next 9or hidden) layer which does the 'learning', finally the hidden layer connects to the output layer. A neural network is not like a computer because it cannot be programmed. Instead it is trained and tested repeatedly, until it has learnt. This is done by providing an input and informing the network whether it has produced the correct output. Based on this information, the strength of connections in the hidden layer is adjusted automatically by the network, because of the arrangements of learning rules programmed into the perceptron. This process is repeated until the training is over and the network can then be tested to see how well it has learnt. In the same way as humans learn from other humans, the neural network needs a teacher to tell when it is right and when it is wrong. It is important to remember that the teacher does not program the network, but only provides information as to whether the output was correct or not, Gradually the network learns that a particular input corresponds to a particular desired output. In as sense the input begins to have meaning" -- Brain a beginner's guide by Ammar al-Chalabi, Shabe R. Delamont and Martin Turner
• "You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." -- Richard Feynman
• "..We do not feel that we really know anything unless we can represent it to ourselves in words, or in some other system of conventional signs such as the notations of mathematics or music. Such knowledge is called conventional because it is a matter os social agreement as to the codes of communication. " -- The way of Zen by Alan W. Watts
• Is all about A implies B
• http://www.arunjain.com/jokes/Shit_-_A_Bird_Story.htm
• “Every particle in the universe,” continued Dirk, warming to his subject and beginning to stare a bit, “affects every other particle, however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything. The beating of a butterfly’s wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate this table-leg in a way that made sense to me, or to the table-leg,then it could provide me with the answer to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody I liked, chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared to think of, and their answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem to which I am seeking a solution. It is only a question of knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom I have met entirely by chance, probably know things that are vital to my investigation, if only I knew what to ask you, which I don’t, and if only I could be bothered to, which I can’t.”  -- The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
• “No private detective looks like a private detective. That’s one of the first rules of private detection.” 
        “But if no private detective looks like a private detective,how does a private detective know what it is he’s supposed not to look like? Seems to me there’s a problem there.” -- The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
• Being Amused by Apophenia : "The experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data was coined apophenia by the German neurologist, Klaus Conrad. He originally described this phenomenon as a kind of psychotic thought process, though it is now viewed as being a ubiquitous feature of human nature." Pattern Seeing
• Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.Pattern Seeing
2. Understanding
• "What we want ultimately is solidity to vanish, to dissolve, to disintegrate into soem totally different kind of phenomenon with which we have no experience"  -- Metamagical Themas by Douglas R Hofstader

Wonder : Truth

• paraphrasing George E.P.Box: "All truths are false, some may be useful."

References

1. Radical honesty
2. Avoid telling the truth
3. Kural 291: Truth is that which does not cause harm -- ThiruValluvar
4. "Good men never speak the truth" : Thus Spake Zarathustra
5. "I worked out lifetime philosophies of truth and happiness in high school and early college years. I worked out a few keys for my own life but they wouldn’t necessarily work for someone else" -- Steve Wozniak

Mystery : Brain

1. "Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. ('What else could it be?') I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer" -- John R. Searle, "Brains, Minds, and Science"
2. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/aug/unsolved-brain-mysteries/