Cooking

"Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." - Douglas Adams

Cooking is a lot like that too. Especially for beginners. DO NOT think about the picture in the recipe book or package while cooking.
Think about the day in the office, that Simpsons episode, make your wishlist, convert 30 degree centigrate to fahrenheit, make weekend plans, trace your family tree.

Somewhere between calculating the value of PI to the 5th place, coming up with a fitting reply to that colleague's remark and cursing the person who jerked the hand that held the open garam masala packet, somehow
the food becomes, oh, not like the picture in the recipe[it *never* becomes like that. Those are air brushed] but something quite edible.

Choices

Chocolate or Vanilla. Arts or Science. Bus or cab. Regular or Diet. Free Will or Destiny. Organic or artificial. Attend or bunk. Evolution or Creationism. Some are easy. Some are obvious. Some determine the next few minutes. Some, that you can look back and know that those were the choices that made all the difference. Some that freak you out before. Some that will haunt you long after decision time.
Of course, as people point out sagely, its not all black or white. There's a massive grey area. But, sometimes, choosing the middle road only takes you so far.

Of course, this has all been done before and, as a small comfort in times of conflict, we get to use the Bard's most popular (and easiest to remember) quotes "To be or not to be, that is the question"

Book review - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

It's good. Really good.

Well, everyone else is doing it

Call it what you want. The me-too complex, the herd mentality [this is as much as I knew. The terms that follow are courtesy wikipedia], GroupThink, Collective consciousness, Flocking, Conformism (!). It got me to and through engineering and now a return to blogging.