Pale blue dot by Carl Sagan

Thanks to the breakthrough prize, Let me know the famous Pulitzer Prize writer Carl Sagan, his "pale blue dot" quote inspire us to think bigger and further.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Hang in the past Vs. Expect the new challenges

Saw two videos about cinemas, one is about CJ4DX, one is about the last one theatre in Hawaii.

CJ4DX is a trendy high-tech cinema which ames at young-fashionable teenagers or those consumers live in crowed concrete world, those cucumbers who need to release stress or experience extremely feelings in fast speed live style. 

http://www.nytimes.com/video/business/media/100000003258668/movies-meet-theme-park.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

The last one theatre in Hawaii is more about humans, about friendship, lovely neighbourhood, these ppl don't care much more about the consumer world.

http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003259816/the-last-cinema-in-paradise.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

"Social hug for the town"

"Not too far from nowhere, even further from nowhere"

"In the middle of nowhere, but also in the middle of everywhere"

"We have to adapt, I am afraid to left behind again"

Just think of the CNN show I saw last night part unknown, it was about Middle East countries, where ppl are more friendly than first tire cities in the world. Guess it's because of the material things shape ppl's perspective. 

http://edition.cnn.com/video/shows/anthony-bourdain-parts-unknown/season-4/iran/index.html

"What we saw, what we came back with, is a deeply confusing story. Because the Iran you see from the inside, once you walk the streets of Tehran, meet Iranians, is a very different place than the Iran we know from the news. Nowhere else I've been has the disconnect been so extreme between what one sees and feels from the people and what one sees and hears from the government."

What Anthony Bourdain said reminds me the brain wash theory: don't let media define what you see things. 

I totally agree what they say, "I saw it on media, but I need to go there myself."  

If you want to live well in rapidly changing big cities around the world, you have no choice of hang in the past, need to be highly adaptive, adapt the intangible stress from your crowd, adapt the craving for climbing to the top of the "successful" ladder. But seems the less well developed places, ppl there are less cold blood or craving for money, they choose the adapt the lifestyle which didn't change for a decade, but trying to find the simplest happiness of human beings. 

But this is the world we are going to live, ppl are prefer to move to mega cities to experience those inexperienced. Just need to be more creative and always be curious, around the unknown you either choose to learn or dismiss, which can lead you to different life paths. 

Praxeology, Perspective is Everything

When you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people, you don't actually want to spend all the time talking. It's really, really tiring. Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher. 

This is the reason I cannot really enjoy a drinks party since I don't smoke.

We too often forget:
1. Things are not what they are; they are what we think they are;
2. Things are what we compare them to;
3. Yet we make psychology subordinate to everything else;
4. Psychological value is often the best kind.

“Could I do with a little life editing? Would that give me a little more freedom? Maybe a little more time?” 

Because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality, its duration, but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait. Waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes, knuckle-biting going, "When's this train going to damn well arrive?" 

Here's a beautiful example of a psychological solution deployed in Korea. Red traffic lights have a countdown delay. It's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments. Why? Because road rage, impatience and general irritation are massively reduced when you can actually see the time you have to wait. In China, not really understanding the principle behind this, they applied the same principle to green traffic lights. Which isn't a great idea. You're 200 yards away, you realize you've got five seconds to go, you floor it. The Koreans, very assiduously, did test both. The accident rate goes down when you apply this to red traffic lights; it goes up when you apply it to green traffic lights. 

I propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we didn't even realize were problems at all. This is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics. Don't give them 24 white pills. Give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first and then take the blue ones. It's called chunking. The likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle. 

Charlie Munger: "If economics isn't behavioral, I don't know what the hell is."

Von Mises completely rejected this distinction. And he used this following analogy. He referred actually to strange economists called the French Physiocrats, who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land. So if you're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer, you created true value. If however, you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat, you weren't actually creating value, you were exploiting the shepherd. 

Von Mises believes economics is just a subset of psychology, he refers to economics as "the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity".

So if you do something that's perceptually bad in one respect, you can damage the other. 

Rory Sutherland: Perspective is everything

What if the purpose of love isn’t getting people into relationships, but out of them?

What if the purpose of love is to get us out of relationships, not into them? 

Falling in love, or something like it, has been well characterized in monogamous prairie voles, for example. In these animals, a series of clever experiments established that the hormones released when two prairie voles mate—oxytocin and vasopressin—bind to neurons in the part of their brains responsible for reward. These are the same areas activated by drugs of addiction, leading scientists to say that, in effect, drugs hijack systems that evolved to allow us to fall in love.

Monogamy is rare in animals. Only about 3-5% of them practice lifelong monogamy. In humans, it’s only slightly more common. If you look at pre-industrial cultures, which until about 50 years ago meant most of the cultures on earth, 80% practiced some sort of non-monogamy.

As humans with higher-order reasoning, and the ability to plan for the future and prioritize things other than our base instincts, we are capable of choosing (or being forced to choose) between priorities other than love.

So what is the purpose of love?

Such questions are inherently unanswerable, since evolution is not a process with the kind of will or intentionality these questions imply.

There was no creator guiding the process of humans’ long narrative across the millennia—there was no “purpose” to any of this evolution, only its results.

One of the “purposes” of love, not incompatible with the binding together of two people, is to make them crazy enough to ditch their current partners first? Certainly, the overwhelming evidence from our genes and from the history of human societies is that something is driving breakups just as powerfully as that same mechanism, or some related one, drives people to get together in the first place.

Racing With Robots

We are living in "THE NEW MACHINE AGE", the age computers get better and faster than anything else ever, the age knowledge creation is more compatible than physical production. We invented siri, we invented IBM's Watson, we invented 4D printing...we have all these invention and they even got the most important skill themselves: machine learning! The black mirror told us this, HER pointed out this, but most of people still don't realize: technology is racing ahead, and it's leaving more and more people behind. How can a skilled worker compete with a piece of software? He can't.

Same with headhunting industry, this industry exists just because the asymmetric information, companies and job seekers get different information, we are earning money from asymmetric information. People know money and information are the two things in the world that people will not give you for free, and we can get money from information. But people forget all these information is a part of big data, and nowadays the big data is making all kinds of choices for us. Algorithm can tell us what movies we should watch, what music we should listen, like Netflix, like Pandora. And today it already can suggest us what jobs we are applying for, or tell employers who they should hire! Like AfterCollege.com, like Knack. Machines are doing this matchmaking jobs instead of headhunters.

No wonder more and more people will no longer have jobs, not only in the headhunting industry, but also in media and music, in finance and manufacturing, in retailing and trade...in fact, in every industry. Instead of slowing down the technology, we need to race with the machine.

Inspiration Everyday

"Money as a mean for access."
-Lifehacker
https://soundcloud.com/lifehacker/cellphone-carrier-bonanza

"At Khan Academy, when we hire, it’s nice if you have a high GPA and an academically rigorous major. But what we really care about is what you’ve made. For engineers, show us software you’ve designed. We also want evidence of how you work with other people, the leadership you exhibit, and what your peers think of you."
-Salman Khan
http://hbr.org/2014/01/salman-khan/ar/1?referral=00134

"There are two things people will not give you for free: money and information," says Pyle
"have a conversation with information in it,"
Read more: How to Find out Anything from Anyone | TIME.com http://healthland.time.com/2014/01/23/how-to-find-out-anything-from-anyone/#ixzz2rIAPmcUP

"photography is an art of continuous reinvention"
-http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/24/100-ideas-that-changed-photography/

“ The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do. ”
-Walter Bagehot

"It's you vs snow. Don't let the snow win."

谁的人生不是概率组成的呢？

My life is probabilities.
The odds of me meeting my Mr. right: it's two million to one.
And the odds of our falling in love: 60 million to one.