37. Instructions For Life From the Dalai Lama

Instructions for Life in the new millennium from the Dalai Lama:

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve
great risk.
2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs: Respect for self, respect for others,
responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful
stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to
correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honorable life. Then, when you get older and think
back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current
situation. Don't bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.
Be gentle with the earth.
15. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.
16. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for
each other exceeds your need for each other.
17. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
18. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

36. How A Young Lady Dismisses Her Lover

I copied the following two letters from an 1865 book entitled, "The United States Letter Writer". I thought it might be useful to the young ladies of today in helping them to disengage themselves from an unhealthy relationship and show them that there is an alternative to saying “You bastard, go to hell!”

How A Young Lady Dismisses Her Lover

Mr. N. N., Sir:
Since we have become better acquainted, you have, I am sorry to say, displayed qualities which I did not expect in you. Everyone must form a very unfavorable opinion of you, and this opinion would also extend to me. You therefore oblige me by this means, to the disagreeable step of dissolving our friendly relationship. If you traduce me for it, I have to bear with it, and will remind you, that slander from you will be looked upon as praise, by every one who knows me. This explanation, as disagreeable as it is to me, I owe to my reputation, without at all wishing to offend you.
Respectfully, N. N.

Mr. N. N., Sir:
Your conduct of yesterday has so lowered you in my estimation that I am necessitated to break off our friendly connection.
I am glad that I have become acquainted with your ignoble character in time. If you cannot conduct yourself properly before we are married, how would it be afterwards? It is true that intoxication was the cause of your improper conduct; but should a man who pretends to be a gentleman, ever be intoxicated? At the same time I learned that this is not the first time that you have so far forgotten yourself, but that you are much addicted to intoxicating liquors. This is quite enough for me! I would not have a drunkard for a husband, and to avoid anything unpleasant you will not call upon me again.
N. N.

35. BI#6, A Couple Of Auto Improvements

Brillent Idea Number Six

I don’t understand why in this technological age we still need a stick to measure oil. Come on auto makers, one simple dial instead of a stick and the women will go for it.
Also, why not use wooden bumpers so that when you bump into something only the bumper is damaged. Bumpers made out of soft pine that would stick out a couple of inches. They could be painted and replaced using a few bolts.

Next, someone develop a computer game for kids and adults to be played at different levels. How about a Lost In The Wilderness game at several levels. Beginning with young kids, when they realize they are lost to stay in place, don’t keep moving. For adults, three days to find water, three weeks to find food. How to make fire, shelter etc. Need for sleep. What plants are edible? Using a compass. This would not be a killer animal game.

While I’m at it why not allow all computer applications to have several levels of competence. For example, Microsoft Word at level one would be for beginners. Level one would be the Word that was released twenty years ago.

34. From, The Saviors of God by Nikos Kazantzakis

The mind of man can perceive appearances only
and never the essence of things.

And not all appearances but only the appearance of matter.

And not even these appearances of matter
but only relationships between them.

And these relationships are not real and independent
of man for even these are his creations.

And they are not the only ones humanly possible but simply
the most convenient for his practical and perceptive needs.
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33. Norbert Wiener

From The Emerging Science Of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz

Among scientists, Norbert Wiener will never be forgotten, for reasons both serious and silly. On the serious side, his name is enshrined in the terminology of advanced mathematics: Wiener process, Paley-Wiener theroem, Wiener-Hopf technique, and so on. A former child prodigy who received his PH.D. from Harvard at age 18. On the silly side, mathematicians love to tell stories about Wiener. He was so absentminded that when he and his family moved from Cambridge to Newton, his wife wrote out their new address and directions home from his office, knowing full well he would forget they had moved. Sure enough, Wiener used the note as scrap paper for some calculations, threw it away, and walked back to his old house. When he arrived, he realized he no longer lived there, so he stopped a little girl on the street and asked her if she knew where the Wieners had moved. She said, "Yes daddy, come with me."

32. Attention Clint Eastwood, Your Next Movie

Treatment

Time; current, an adobe house in the Nevada desert. Early morning. Clint opens door and walks out on porch with dog. Gets pail and goes to well. Dog growls. “I see him Sam” Shot to distant figure walking down dirt road toward them. Clint goes back into house. Stands by front door, places rifle next to door, watches young girl approach. As she gets near a shot rings out and she falls. Clint tells the dog to go after the shooter who is on a nearby ridge. The girl has shoulder wound, nothing serious. Clint takes care of her, doesn’t ask any questions. She asks lots about his life. The next day the boy who delivers groceries to Clint once a month comes in. They put the girl in the back of the pickup. As they drive away she yells to Clint, “You’re a hell of a father”. Zing!
The next day Clint packs a bag, he and the dog walk dirt road to highway and hitchhike to small town where girl was taken to hospital. First he goes to phone booth and calls his dead ex wife’s sister in San Francisco. She tells him his daughter was born after the divorce and his wife did not want him to know. The wife died of cancer when the daughter was three and the sister raised the daughter.
Next Clint calls his best friend, a doctor, who is treating him for incurable cancer.
Next Clint goes to hospital and finds out the girl snuck out.
Next Clint rents a car and drives to San Francisco. Goes to sister-in-laws house and finds her murdered.
The rest of the story is about Clint chasing after his daughter, stopping the hired killers and finding out who is behind it and why. Clint, drop me an email and I'll tell you the surprise ending.

31. Made Out Of Meat - Terry Bission

I like science fiction because it shows a different point of view.
PS: I realize this is going to strain your attention span because its all of two pages but I think it's worth it.
(Edited)

“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The message to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they are made out of meat.”
“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
“Nope, they are born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take too long. Do you have any idea of the life span of meat?”
“Spare me. Maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the weddilei, a meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.”
“Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the way through.”
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat!”
“So...what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat! Dreaming meat! The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture?”
“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”
“Finally. Yes, they are indeed made out of meat and they have been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years.”
“So what does this meat have in mind?”
“First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the universe, contact other sentients, swap ideas and information. The usual.
“Were supposed to talk to meat?”
“That’s the idea. That’s the message they’re sending out by radio. ‘Hello. Anyone out there? Anybody home?’ That sort of thing.”
“They actually do talk then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”
“Oh yes, except they do it with meat.”
“I thought you just told me that they use the radio.”
“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds, you know how when you slap of flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”
“Omigod, singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?”
“Officially or unofficially?”
“Both”
‘Officially, we are required to contact, welcome, and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant, without prejudice, fear, or favor. Unofficially I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing.”
“I was hoping you would say that”
“It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?”
“I agree one hundred percent. What’s there to say? ‘Hello meat, how’s it going?
But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?”
“Just one, they can travel to other planets in special meat containers but they can’t stay live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space which pretty much limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim, infinitesimal in fact.”
“So we just pretend there’s no one home in the universe.”
“That’s it”
“Cruel, but you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed, you’re sure they wont remember?”
“They’ll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to them and we marked the sector Unoccupied.”
“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate that the real universe should be meat’s dream”
“Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed.”