I really enjoyed reading this article written by The Dalai Lama, and featured in HBR which talks about leadership, and compassion, and especially the last part about the three types of leaders described in the Buddhist tradition:

Buddhist tradition describes three styles of compassionate leadership: the trailblazer, who leads from the front, takes risks, and sets an example; the ferryman, who accompanies those in his care and shapes the ups and downs of the crossing; and the shepherd, who sees every one of his flock into safety before himself. Three styles, three approaches, but what they have in common is an all-encompassing concern for the welfare of those they lead.

I found this video very useful in trying to learn to solve the 2×2 cube.

 

Up until the 19th century — humans didn’t know that bird migrated for winters, and there were wild theories that explained the disappearance of birds during winter.

While Aristotle thought that one type of bird changed into another type, there was a Harvard professor who thought they just went to the moon during winters!

In 1822 – a German hunter shot down a stork with his arrow, and to his great surprise found that the stork had an African spear going through its neck! This gave birth to the term Pfeilstorch, which means arrow stork.

Source: Wikipedia Commons

It would seem that this is the unluckiest stork in the history of all storks – it flew to Central Africa from Germany, got shot by a spear, and then traveled all the way back only to be shot down by an arrow! But, what’s even more incredible is that there are 25 recorded instances of such storks! The first pfeilstorch has been preserved, and is on display in the German Museum of Natural History.

The video below is very interesting, and has other tidbits about this.

The conquest and annexation of Sind in 1843, a spin-off of the reinvasion of Afghanistan, did nothing to quell such doubts. Major-General Sir Charles Napier frankly admitted that ‘we have no right to seize Scinde’; yet he actively ‘bullied’ (his own word) the Sindis into hostilities and then conducted what he called this ‘very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality’ with maximum brutality. It contravened a sheaf of treaties, themselves signed under duress, which had previously been concluded with the various rulers, or ‘amirs’, of Sind, and it incurred almost universal condemnation in Britain. The story that Napier, in one of the shortest telegraphs ever sent, announced his victory with a single Latin verb is apparently apocryphal. ‘Peccavi’ (meaning ‘I have sinned [i.e. Sind]’), was not unworthy of Napier’s wit, but it was in fact the caption given him by the magazine Punch; ‘and Punch represented him as confessing that he had sinned because the deposition of the Amirs and the seizure of their territories raised such a storm of criticism in England’.

It has become fairly common to read advances in AI that blow your mind, but this one was particularly astonishing. FB created AI chatbots and taught them to negotiate, and somehow these chatbots developed their own language, and stopped using English.

From The Epoch Times
“In one exchange revealed by Facebook to Fast Co. Design, two negotiating bots—Bob and Alice—started using their own language to complete a conversation.
“I can i i everything else,” Bob said.
“Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to,” Alice responded.
The rest of the exchange formed variations of these sentences in the newly-forged dialect, even though the AIs were programmed to use English.
According the researchers, these nonsense phrases are a language the bots developed to communicate how many items each should get in the exchange.
When Bob later says “i i can i i i everything else,” it appears the artificially intelligent bot used its new language to make an offer to Alice.
The Facebook team believes the bot may have been saying something like: “I’ll have three and you have everything else.”