Content Mixture – It’s getting better and it’s still not good enough

It’s easy to be cynical and maintain that nothing is ever getting better. “You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at once: the world is getting better and it’s not good enough!”

This mixture includes two items.

Excerpts from #1:

The world is not a perfect place. Many things went wrong for humanity this year. You’ve heard a lot about them. We still have major problems, in particular around environmental degradation, international migration, political extremism and economic inequality. These are the big challenges of our time. And it’s also true that the surge of progress has not reached everyone. Far too many people still live in extreme poverty, 6 million children still die every year of preventable diseases and hundreds of millions of people cannot exercise basic freedoms. But as one of my favourite statisticians Hans Rosling says, “You have to be able to hold two ideas in your head at once: the world is getting better and it’s not good enough!”

It’s easy to be cynical and maintain that nothing is ever getting better. The empirical evidence flatly contradicts this view; looking at what what we’ve already achieved as a species should give us confidence going forward into the future.

Excerpts from #2:

This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not – and I know that most people do not – violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.

The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood. What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off?

The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.

More reading:

The Games

“[…]And yet, as a culture that worships at the altar of immediacy and instant gratification, we continue to romanticize the largely mythic notion of the overnight success, overlooking the years of struggle and failure that paved the way for some of humanity’s most admired and accomplished luminaries.”

[…]

This celebration of youth, coupled with technology, has distorted our perception of time — the world moves faster, and so do our expectations. Today, we want success in seventeen levels, or seventeen minutes, seventeen seconds — and when the promise of something new and better is just a click away, who wants to wait seventeen years? But that’s the thing that connects all of these great people — they played the long game.

[…]

All of us have the brain, and the talent, and the creativity to join them. But now, right when it matters, do any of us have the patience?”

> Read more – The Long Game at BrainPickings <

“I was doing a lecture for a group of students several months ago and I was talking about how long things can take… And a young woman raised her hand at the end of the lecture… and asked for some advice, because she had started a blog and she was hoping to get some pointers on how to get people to come to the blog, to read the blog, because she was feeling very discouraged — she’d been doing it for a while and people weren’t reading it. She wasn’t getting any traction. And so, of course, my first question was “How long have you been doing it?” And very sincerely, very earnestly, she said, “Six weeks.”

[…]

And this is, I think, a really unfortunate ramification from this 140-character culture — that people in their twenties, when they graduate from college, expect that they have to be successful. And if they’re not successful right out of the gate, then there’s something wrong with them. And then that builds into this real sense of hopelessness, because they haven’t achieved something quickly.”

> Read more – What It Takes to Design a Good Life <

“More common and more celebrated are people who play a longer game. They build an asset, earn trust, give before getting, and then, after paying their dues, win.
There’s something else available, though, something James Carse calls an infinite game.

[…]

In the infinite game, though, something completely different is going on. In the infinite game, the point is to keep playing, not to win. In the infinite game, the journey is all there is. And so, players in an infinite game never stop giving so they can take. Players in this game throw a slower pitch so the batter can hit it, because a no-hitter shutout has no real upside.

[…]

The wrong question to ask is, “but how do they win?” The right way to understand it is, “but is it worth playing?””

> Read more – The short game, the long game and the infinite game <

"Tracks in the dirt" by Charles Henry

Libraries in Malls

Books
Creative Commons License photo credit: phoebe photo (FeeBeeDee)

Malls are convenient spots for some quality urban leisure. And libraries are enriching spots. Mix them up and you get a wonderful place to have some quality, enriching times.

It could be located among the top-most floors, giving it a calm-er atmosphere than the other floors.
There could be some open-to-all sections in addition to the members-only area. This way, the occasional/casual readers will not be left out.
There could also be some system similar to a prepaid-card which would entitle a person to access the members-area for a specified amount of time.
The lending service could be made a members-only service.

Why does this make sense?

The infrastructure needs like electrical system, parking, security, air conditioning, restrooms will all be taken care of centrally.
Malls are already established places of interest and it makes only sense to add value to it.

Would you rather visit an individual library with minimal infrastructure or a library in a mall that offer much more comfort & convenience?

Upon Googling, these related links were found:

 

A thing or two about History

The nature of History has changed. It’s no more a past-thing, but present-things with parts of future-things. The imagery of History we are acquainted with can be finally discarded. We have managed to catch up with our past which was lived by people who were busy setting up things and platforms that they couldn’t document much. So we had to appoint historians and we did, and they have done their job.

We can take it on from here. History is everyday. It changed it’s nature. Everything being done or happening anywhere is archived in real-time, seamlessly and almost automatically. There will be no more sitting-down-to-write-the-past. There needs to be only searches into the upto-the-second archive. What is left for historians to do is, maybe compile this archive, which is vastly spread-across, into different categories/time-periods to facilitate the searches and to offer content for those who are not searching for something specific but wants to know about things in general.

It’s a colorful future ahead and as such, the history will be colorful too.