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Sunday, February 15, 2026

15: Iran

Good design is often slightly funny. This one may not always be true. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me slightly funny. Godel's incompleteness theorem seems like a practical joke. ............... Good design is hard. If you look at the people who've done great work, one thing they all seem to have in common is that they worked very hard. ............ When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's "form follows function," what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives. ............ Good design looks easy. Like great athletes, great designers make it look easy. Mostly this is an illusion. The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite. .......... Line drawings are in fact the most difficult visual medium, because they demand near perfection. In math terms, they are a closed-form solution; lesser artists literally solve the same problems by successive approximation. One of the reasons kids give up drawing at ten or so is that they decide to start drawing like grownups, and one of the first things they try is a line drawing of a face. Smack! ........... In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come with practice. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought. In some cases you literally train your body. An expert pianist can play notes faster than the brain can send signals to his hand. Likewise an artist, after a while, can make visual perception flow in through his eye and out through his hand as automatically as someone tapping his foot to a beat. .......................... When people talk about being in "the zone," I think what they mean is that the spinal cord has the situation under control. Your spinal cord is less hesitant, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems. ................ There are two kinds of symmetry, repetition and recursion. Recursion means repetition in subelements, like the pattern of veins in a leaf. ................ In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always best solved that way. The Eiffel Tower looks striking partly because it is a recursive solution, a tower on a tower. ................. Good design resembles nature. It's not so much that resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature has had a long time to work on the problem. It's a good sign when your answer resembles nature's. ................... Mistakes are natural. Instead of treating them as disasters, make them easy to acknowledge and easy to fix. Leonardo more or less invented the sketch, as a way to make drawing bear a greater weight of exploration. Open-source software has fewer bugs because it admits the possibility of bugs. .........

Einstein didn't try to make relativity strange. He tried to make it true, and the truth turned out to be strange.

............. Good design happens in chunks. The inhabitants of fifteenth century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Milan at the time was as big as Florence. How many fifteenth century Milanese artists can you name? .................... the reason is that to make Leonardo you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450. ................. Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. ............. great work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots: the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker, Lockheed's Skunk Works, Xerox Parc. ................... Much Renaissance art was in its time considered shockingly secular: according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, and Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of their work. Einstein's theory of relativity offended many contemporary physicists, and was not fully accepted for decades-- in France, not until the 1950s.

Quite separate from the endeavour of the sciences, and in no way conflicting these findings, the Vedantic sages focused on the asymptotic philosophical explanation of the cause-effect relationship. In particular, they asked ‘What is the primal cause — the cause that caused it all and itself was causeless’. ................... The sages proposed ‘existence’ or ‘सत् / sat’ as this primal cause. The proposal is not a thing, a being, or an idea existing, but existence itself. Why is existence its own cause? What could the cause of existence be? Whatever it may be, it cannot exist for it would causally precede existence. Thus, existence is causeless and is the ground reality underlying everything that is. .............. existence, the primal cause, is singular, timeless, and omnipresent. ................. In the religions of Sanātana Dharma, this has significant implications. This philosophical idea of the one in many is encoded in religious practices of seeing divinity everywhere. We pray to the stone, the tree, the cow, the mother, the mountain, and everything else. The variety that we experience in the world is celebrated as expressions of the same divinity. ................

Vedanta shares the rigour and precision of science, while it also shares the humanistic goals of the social sciences.

................. the Vedantic sages explored timeless asymptotic principles within the laboratories of their own selves. ................. the world we experience within our lifetimes on earth seem to be well understood by basic scientific principles. .............. the findings of the Vedantic sages on the primal cause of the universe deeply inform living practices of religions. Even for the agnostic or atheistic, the principle of the primal cause suggests an aesthetic universality to all that is. .................. the trinity of matter, mind, and mathematics. .............. Like existence, consciousness is not a thing, or a being, or an idea. It is a mathematical or philosophical abstraction. .............. there is a singular consciousness that is one with existence and pervades all conscious experience. ................. They state, I am not the body, I am not the mind, I am not the intellect, I am not my memory, I am not even the sense of ego. I am the consciousness that enables all experiences. The experiences change — from sweet to salty, from happy to sad — but I the consciousness remains ever unaffected. ...................... This is a significant leap for the sense of identity of an individual. I am not an individual that is born and dies, but am an unaffected consciousness experiencing this universe. Even more significantly, since consciousness is one, all people, animals, plants, and other conscious beings are lit up by the same consciousness. Everything that is, is experienced in consciousness that is one. This is the key idea of the many in one. ................... If there is only one consciousness, why then do we have different experiences? The experiences are different only as perceived in minds which differ from individual to individual. When we see all that is as nothing but existence, there is indeed no difference. This lofty idea proclaims my membership to a cosmic unity. And from this cosmic unity, almost all of ethics can be derived. ....................... Vedanta is not based on faith, it only lays out manuals. An individual is challenged to prove or disprove the above by self-effort. .................. Consciousness as defined here cannot be objectified. ........... More recently, there is recognition of mindfulness or flow as being a desirable state. ............... They proposed completeness as the solution to this. The corresponding word is आनन्द / ananda, which is normally translated as happiness or bliss. ............... the abstract idea of completeness is the desire-less desire. .......... Every desire experienced in the world is in essence a partial attempt at completeness. This is a subtle point that highlights the deep insight of the sages. They recognised that every desire — noble or otherwise — is at its core selfish. That is, every desire loops back to the self in trying to acquire something new or to preserve something already acquired. For some cases, this loop is quite short and clear: I eat sugar because I experience a high because I get pleasure. For some other cases, the sequence is longer: I write articles because I would like to influence people because I would like to promote the civilisational ideas because I identify myself as Indian and because I would like to preserve my Indian-ness. .................... The key principle is that every desire is a partial attempt at completeness which loops back to the self — the self that we had already identified as consciousness — the consciousness which we had found to be pervaded by existence. This establishes the unity of existence-consciousness-completeness or सत्-चित्-आनन्द / sat-chit-ananda. These are not three things that are together, or even three properties of one thing. They are all one — the all pervasive existence, the self-effulgent consciousness, and the enlivening completeness. .................. Most of us live our lives driven and often enslaved by our desires of acquiring physical comfort, monetary wealth, societal fame, peace, and wisdom.

Growing discontent amidst material richness is a widespread contemporary paradox.

However, the sages tell us that all that we desire is completeness, which most significantly, is already our true nature. I — the conscious self — am always complete (पूर्ण /purna). .................... I-myself right now am complete and thus desire-less. But I do not experience this because I continue to associate with the body-mind-intellect rather than consciousness and consequently I continue to experience a world of plurality in place of the singular existence. ................. This indeed is amongst the loftiest findings of the sages — that only existence-consciousness-completeness is real. ............. While this cosmic manifestation and un-manifestation plays out, Vedanta implores us an individuals to walk on our own path towards completeness, here and now. And this is to be achieved not by prayer to God, or service to mankind, or control of the mind and breath. Instead, it is to be done only by waking up to the knowledge of our real self by self-enquiry. However, all the time-tested systems of religion are most useful in preparing the ground for discovering our true nature.

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