The Upside of Irrationality

I recently completed the theory of irrationality by dan ariely and it contained many nice sociology theories like:

1) Improve a bad experience by giving yourself consolation prizes: e.g. if you are sick, watch TV :)

2) Motivating people and finding meaning in your work is more important than huge monetary rewards.

3) People attach more value to something which is their own creation e.g. my own created dish, sculpture, painting even if it might not be the best of the creations which you might have seen in this world.

4) You want to contribute, so whatever you do should end up as having an impact, you don't want your work to be scraped.

Festivals should be special !

My few observations about celebrating festivals:

1) If you ignore a festival, it will ignore you back !

2) When you are a kid, small things matter more to you !

3) Good experiences matter more than good objects !

4) Read something good, get some new experiences, variety enriches your mind and widens your horizons !

5) Create, Innovate and Contribute !

X-Men: First Class

I am a huge fan of science fiction genre and thus x-men is one of the favorite movies. So as per the generic trend, x-men first class was out as a prequel trying to define the earlier years of charles xavier and magneto. Charles Xavier being played by James MacAvoy as a benevolent positive character aiming at the peace among mutants and humans is well etched out. The transformation of a child named Eric caught in a concentration camp at the time of world-war II to Magento is terrifically tragic and has a shock and awe factor.

There's another theme of accepting yourself for what you are as a proud mutant and has been told through another character Mystic who finds it difficult to accept the rejection from men as she has an indigo blue scaly form. She might have been thought attractive in avatar by Navis ! Anyway mangeto gives her the confidence to accepts her for herself thus gaining her loyalty and alignment in this world where even mutants have various warring factions.

James McAvoy is brilliant in another movie atonement with Keira Knightley. I missed Scot and Jean in x-men first class, and everyone missed wolverine !  Still it's a fabulous way to tie the loose ends in the story !

Learn to Float !

On our Rishikesh trip, I finally was able to gather up all my courage and learn to do some basic things related to submerging in water. Go away ! The fear of drowning and here comes floating and cliff jumping ! 

Floating is all about relaxing, letting water enter your ears and spreading your body to balance your body weight and make yourself float like a dead body. It's an amazing experience as your mind goes blank, you can stop thinking and completely relax.

While doing the Cliff Jumping, I was more worried about not hitting the rocks around and atleast I was able to make on attempt at it, though from a lesser height ! :)

And in rafting I sat at the centre of the raft at front and just encouraged my friends to keep rowing by repeating the commands given by the captain ! :)

Google+

Google + has just been launched and it's main underlying concept is to create groups or rather circles more easily and enable users to share content with a subset of friends rather than the complete friend list. After a basic preview, I have not yet been able to observe any new outstanding innovative feature. Facebook is already allowing creation of groups for selective publishing of content, but facebook's tendency to share more rather than less was pushing persons like me to do a lot of self censorship.

Let's see how well Google+ ends up creating any differentiating critical factor to pull users or not ! Or it might end up as a less used orkut or buzz !