Skip to main content

Tempus Fugit

I recently started reading what promises to be a very interesting book - "The Time Paradox" by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd. It opens up quite unexpectedly with a story about Capuchin Crypt, a somewhat surreal place located under one of the churches in Rome. This is the kind of stuff one comes to expect from Dan Brown's novels (say, "The Da Vinci Code" or "Angels and Demons"), but much less so from the book, written by a psychology professor from Stanford and a research director for Yahoo!, that according to one review - "reveals how to better use your most irreplaceable resource [time], based on solid science and timeless wisdom".
Wikipedia - "The Capuchin Crypt is a small space comprising several tiny chapels located beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on the Via Veneto near Piazza Barberini in Rome, Italy. It contains the skeletal remains of 4,000 bodies believed to be Capuchin friars buried by their order. The Catholic order insists that the display is not meant to be macabre, but a silent reminder of the swift passage of life on Earth."
I guess the message here is - "tempus fugit / time flies" (and not just when you are having fun!). A grim sight (though quite contemporary in its use of recycled materials) and a depressing message, as one of the inscriptions puts it - "Quello che voi siete noi eravamo, quello che noi siamo voi sarete / What you are we once were, what we are you will be." Smile! :)   

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

" In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. " The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick - t his was not an easy read for me, I spent more time on this book than on two before and two after (all of comparable volume) combined. And I am not exactly sure why. I guess it could be the style, the vocabulary, the depth and the breadth of the subject matter  coverage , or all of these and few other things put together.  But I feel like it was well worth the effort. The story flows smoothly from the talking drums of Africa to the  world of oral culture;  to the invention of scripts and alphabets; to evolution of languages, books, catalogs and dictionaries; to  further developments of abstraction,  symbolic logic,  and mathematics; to  the birth of computer science, communications theory , information theory, quantum theory, ... I don't think I can right a review that will do this book justice. So, I would simply s

Alan Mathison Turing

Update (11/23/2013): " Now, nearly half a century after the war hero's suicide, Queen Elizabeth II has finally granted Turing a pardon." ( http://usat.ly/19bLZET ) Long overdue!!! With academic background in applied mathematics and computer science and years of experience in Information Technology it would be incredibly surprising if I didn't know of Alan Turing, or so I thought. Sure, I knew who he was and had a good idea of what he had contributed to the fields of mathematics, logic, cryptography, and of course computer science, which he basically founded; and things like Turing Machine, Turing Test, and Enigma Code-breaking have been widely popularized. I also knew that he died relatively young, but I am ashamed to admit that I didn't know anything about the circumstances surrounding his premature death. That is until I read the following in the book titled  "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick: "Turing's hom

Free to Choose

A while back I have written a post about two popular books by Nobel Prize-winning economist   Milton Freidman . Books that had, through their  undeniable logic, a  profound and lasting effect on my  socioeconomic and political views: Now, through the digital powers of social networking the legendary 10-part PBS TV series "Free to Choose" (1980), based on the book of the same name, is available on YouTube. Yes, one would be committing about 10 hours of one's life to watch through all of these; but, in my opinion, this would be time well spent. So, enjoy -  " Free to Choose ".