There's always a ditch in front of someone in a hurry.

- Punjabi proverb

Fail harder. Then learn from it.

Knowledge is not given, it is taken.

30 things I am grateful for:

1. My family
2. My partner and her kitty (2-for-1 deal)
3. Soy
4. Dahl
5. Friends
6. My three black belts
7. My three university degrees
8. A career that shows me the world
9. The respect I have found for all living beings
10. Public transport
11. Bruce Lee, who inspires me to exceed boundaries and expectations
12. Gandhi, who inspires me to practice non-violence in all aspects of life
13. Columbia University Taekwondo, my New York family
14. Naruto
15. Capital gains
16. Earplugs
17. Good history documentaries
18. My RSS feeds
19. Good PS3 games
20. Good listeners
21. Refrigerators
22. People reaching for their dreams
23. Ibuprofen
24. Great quotes
25. Shaving oil
26. Duke basketball
27. Our ability to heal
28. The way I look at things
29. Emotions
30. You, for reading this

The PhD student is someone who forgoes current income in order to forgo future income.

(I don't believe this entirely, but it's amusing)

It takes 16 times more fossil fuels to produce a meat meal than a vegetarian meal.

The livestock industry produces more greenhouse gasses than all transportation.

Why be Vegetarian?

VEGETARIANS ARE HEALTHY

Vegetarians have the lowest rate of atherosclerotic heart disease of anygroup in the United States. The process of atherosclerosis doesn't just cause heart attacks; it also causes impotence. Meat eaters have a ten times greater risk of breast and colon cancer than do pure vegetarians.

On a low fat vegetarian diet 90% of adult-onset diabetics can reduce or entirely eliminate their insulin injections. Tens of millions of Americans suffer from osteoporosis and kidney failure due to excess animal protein consumption. Meat-eating women have levels of chemical pollution in their breast milk 35 times higher than in the breast milk of pure vegetarians.

VEGETARIANS ARE ECOLOGICAL

75% of our food-growing topsoil in the United States has eroded, almost all of it off farmland and grazing land used for animal agriculture. One acre of land growing broccoli will supply ten times as much protein as an acre of land producing beef. If acreage now being used for grazing cattle and raising feed grains were growing trees or fiber plants to burn for energy, we would have no need to import foreign oil. More than half of the water used for all purposes in the United States is used for livestock production. Water pollution from feedlots and feed grain field runoff (manure, topsoil, pesticides, fertilizer, etc.) contaminates more streams and rivers than do all the wastes from all U.S. cities and industries combined.

VEGETARIANS ARE COMPASSIONATE

In the United States ten billion animals are killed for food every year. Veal calves are chained in crates to prevent movement and fed iron-deficient food to make them anemic in order to keep their flesh pale. Egg-laying hens are painfully de-beaked, then raised in cages so small that they are unable to stretch their wings. Fishing depletes fish populations, disrupting vital food chains and forcing marine mammals and sea birds to extinction through starvation. Vegans do not eat animal products and therefore do not contribute to the suffering and needless death of animals raised for food.


- From the homepage of the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii

To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.
- Chinese proverb

What if no one has been where you want to go?

The packaged-goods and fast-food industries spend billions each year on marketing to children, so all our children, rich and poor and everybody in between, need to learn what constitutes a healthy diet and to develop a taste for fresh, healthy foods, especially fruits and vegetables.

- Janet Poppendieck, sociologist and author of "Free for All"

Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, is convinced that the approach to matchmaking embodied by many dating sites represents a market failure. In a recent book, “The Upside of Irrationality”, he argues that the sites treat human beings as if they are goods that can be fully defined according to a set of standard attributes, in much the same way that, say, a digital camera can be described by the number of megapixels that it has and other characteristics. But this cold, drearily functional approach to assessing compatibility fails to capture the indefinable spark that triggers romance.

- The Economist

For as long as anyone can remember, millions of monarch butterflies have wintered in central Mexico after traveling south, but they were greeted by hail last March. In 3 of the last 10 winters, at least half of the population died as a result of the erratic weather.

- NY Times

"The metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet."

- Dave Barry

There will be 5,500 fewer CEOs by 2018, due to mergers and streamlining.

- (US) Bureau of Labor Statistics

It's more important to be useful than clever.

When you've been living out of one suitcase for about 3 weeks, you realize you don't need to own a lot of clothes.

Most milk is produced on factory farms. It contains traces of blood, pus and bacteria, which is why it's dangerous when it's not been boiled first. You're still ingesting that stuff! Quit dairy and find an alternative. Your actions will make restaurants and stores offer different options.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AO2GE20101125

When Singaporeans take foreigners out for a night on the town one activity is usually to make them try durian.

You see all those lights across the water? That's not Indonesia, those are all oil tankers.

- Marlon to me, while we were on a beach in Singapore at night, looking out at hundreds of lights along the horizon.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

- Teddy Roosevelt

We shall now have tea and speak of absurdities.

- Third Uncle from "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing" (1955)