What is FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)?
“Nothing so undermines your financial judgment as the sight of your neighbor getting rich" John Pierpont Morgan.
Thinking is not a linear process, but an iterative one. We see we forget, we revise our understanding in light of new information, and so on. We see something interesting, we're curious about it, so we explore it. That exploration generates more questions, which lead to more investigation, which generates more understanding. Curiosity leads us to look for connections between the new and the old, to seek patterns and also to notice anomalies. So, Welcome to the world of Curiosity.
😑 A Quiz.
Thysanolaena Maxima (tiger grass) helps retain soil moisture and also prevents soil erosion and landslides in the fragile ecosystems of the northern and eastern parts of India. What everyday item used all over India is made of the flowers of this plant?
🔖 Short Takes
ST1.1 The Great Crash and Coffee
After the horrors of the First World War, a giddy optimism overtook most of the world. The Roaring Twenties, a period of wealth and boom in consumer demand, continued through the 1920s. Black Tuesday- the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States hit Wall Street on 29 October 1929, a few months after the Federal Reserve warned of too much speculation. The crash marked the beginning of the Great Depression—a decade of an economic slump leading to severe unemployment and deflation across industrialised countries. How’s the coffee connected with all this?
Well, Nescafé started due to the 1929 Crash. Coffee prices collapsed in the ensuing economic chaos, leaving vast quantities sitting unsold in Brazil. Nestlé was asked to find a way to transform the raw product into instantly soluble coffee whilst retaining its fresh aroma. In America, Brazil’s coffee surplus was immortalized by Frank Sinatra’s 1946 Coffee Song, written by Hilliard and Dick, with these lines, ‘They’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil’.
ST1.2 Colour blindness Test
Although colour has no physical reality in the external world, it is by far the most apparent example of our subjective experience. Research has shown that colour affects mood, behavior and physical activity. Most of us have experienced the uplifting effect of being in a beautifully colored space. Color influences thinking by promoting alertness, enhancing concentration, or even reducing pulse rate.
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental psychology of memory. While he is mostly known for his discovery of the forgetting curve (describes how the ability of the brain to retain information decreases in time), the learning curve. After completing his work on memory, Ebbinghaus turned to research on colour vision and in 1890. In 1893, he also published a «Theory of Colour Vision» in the Zeitschrift für Psychology (Journal of Psychology), in which he mentioned that humans perceive colours through higher mental processes. But his work remained academic in nature.
Shinobu Ishihara joined the Japanese army as a surgeon in 1905, later changing his specialisation to ophthalmology. In 1910 he became an instructor at the Army Medical College. There, in addition to seeing patients, he conducted research on 'battlefield ophthalmology' and how to select superior soldiers. He himself created the first tools to help him in this selection process, hand painted in watercolors using hiragana symbols. All this led to the Color blindness as a screening test done for specific jobs like Aviation(pilot) and Surgeons.
ST1.3 Magic can be scientific
In September 1898, at Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla revealed a new invention. Folks observed a small boat move across the water…all by itself. Some whispered that it must be witchcraft; others suspected a tiny monkey was driving the boat. Tesla told them it was “mind power”, and thus announced his latest invention: a way to remotely control machines with radio technology.
Encouraged by his radio-controlled torpedo boat, Tesla soon filed a patent for the first radio-controlled device in history. Tesla's invention never took off. It was too far ahead of its time. A century later, this invention reached its full potential. With the invention of the transistor, computers became cheap enough for people to own them; and with the invention of cellular telephony and the Internet, computers and telephony became fast enough and pervasive enough for people to use them to control all sorts of physical objects: lights, sprinklers, coffee pots, even power plants.
There is another magic happening, in a company that is named after him.
📻 Replug From TheBizdom
Kamat word has origin in the Sanskrit word of "Kāmati" (i.e. Kaam + Maati) meaning "people who work in soil" or do farming or cultivate the land. "Camotim" was used in the erstwhile Portuguese territory of Goa but has given way to "Kāmat" today. For more of such stories Read
✨ Shower Thoughts
A noisy environment produces people with poor memories. A quiet environment produces curious people.
🛎️ Interesting Tweet
↪️ Answer for the Quiz: Broom. This is why we call it ' phool jhadu’. Also, jhadu in hindi came from the word jhaad meaning forest grass.
Thanks, for reading all this!!