WR's blog

In 1969, around his birthday on July 20, the author had a conversation with his grandmother about the landing of two men on the moon. She doubted that it happened--and that it ever could happen. And she had good reasons. First, when we see it, the moon is always above the Earth. Anyone getting up to it could hardly stay on it for long: a person would fall off. Second, in any case, the moon was too small to hold one man, let alone two men and a vehicle. Furthermore, the moon changes shape. At one time, it is a full disk and, at another, a mere sliver. For a time, it disappears altogether.

Unfortunately, many schools fail to accomplish their primary goal: the education of their students. The immediate causes of this failure are the boredom and chaos that students experience in their classrooms.

Little projects and great public works alike depend on the physical and psychological resources of individual human beings. And the achievement of any goal--major or minor--depends on how well the people in pursuit of that goal are motivated. Motivation, then, is crucial to the progress of a whole society as well as to the progress in an individual's life. Activism, in particular, depends on extraordinary motivation.

We might explode if we stopped, listened, looked at the world as if for the first time--heard the sounds, saw the sights, and began to question what these things we see and hear are all about.

Honesty is the revelation of hearts and minds: it is the expression of thoughts and feelings without reservation or distortion. In honest communication, the life within is made public, put on view for others to see. The honest person is 'transparent': the outer aspect of the person is congruent with--a true representation of--the person's mental and emotional state.

Some people have said, and have meant it, "I wish I had never been born." Aside from how this sentiment could, in the extreme, prompt a further downward slide toward depression and even suicide, the chief problem with admitting this is the hurt it could cause the people who hear it.

BlackBerry offers a couple of services that trouble officials in India: the BlackBerry Messenger Service (BMS) and the BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES). The government of India wants access, by the end of this month, to the information transmitted through these services. The reason for concern is that the encryption used in BMS and BES is so strong that authorities cannot readily crack it.