Musings On Mortality

Ancient philosophers as well as medieval ones often kept human skull on their writing desk, as a reminder of their own mortality. I read this long back and assumed that it is widely known but in the early years the idea appeared to me, as it would appear to most people - a freaky habit !

If at all a skull on your writing desk doesn't startle you to death when you doze off with your chin on the table and wake up to find two hollow sockets staring at you, it should at least obsess you with the idea of your own death! And people obsessed with their own deaths, (euphemistically called fatalists or nihilists) would definitely screw up their present lives as well as the lives of people close to them. So it must be one of those freaky things the ancients practiced because they had lots of free time and loads of silly ideas propagated by their wisest men who probably wouldn't be able to intellectually compete with some of the biggest dumb-asses of our time.

March 11: Japan's Early Warning System

When I first heard about a powerful earthquake, the obvious feeling was one of alarm but when told that the target was Japan, my stress had considerably decreased. Of course, the magnitude (8.9 Richter) did sound far bigger than any other earthquake I had heard or read about, but still I expected loss of lives on a much lesser scale than had it hit any other country. Just a couple of days back I was going through the report covering Russia-UK collaboration to launch new generation satellites for real times monitoring of seismic activities and eventually build tools for prediction.