Karl Murphy

• On the one end of the spectrum, you find the pure optimist. He is confident everything is great, and all negativity is a character flaw.
• Next to him, the extreme optimist accepts that bad things sometimes happen to other people.
• Then comes the optimist who can be sceptical of other people's optimism.
• After him, you find the optimist who is confident in himself and equally pessimistic about others.

A mind that doesn’t need anything in particular, and is not favouring or attached to any sort of condition, expectation or preference would be at home and at ease no matter what the situation, circumstance or event.

Our mind is always clinging to how it wants things and does not like it otherwise. A Buddhist verse, stated in the Diamond Sutra, says that one should develop a mind that clings to nothing.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Swiss Enlightenment philosopher who argued passionately for democracy, equality, liberty and supporting the common good.

Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. He wrote several major works on politics, education, music and botany. But his controversial ideas made him many enemies, forcing him to flee France, Switzerland, and Prussia in turn. His ideas on education, toleration, state sovereignty, democracy, liberty and equality remain very influential.

• Science journal has a new study on the DNA of ancient dogs and humans, which examines the beautiful relationship and shared history of dogs with our species.
• The oldest remains of dogs were found in Germany and date about 15000-16000 years back.
• The new analysis asserts that just when the Ice Age ended, about 11000 years back we had five specific lineages of dogs, developing further into a larger number of families.

Simplifying life isn’t about following certain steps but is in the entire mindset of the person. Our mental habits are what creates the initial complexity, which needs to be eventually simplified.

We need to look at the root cause, and it is desire. The tendency of the mind to want more and more (to be happy), and yet want less at the same time (to be at peace). The resulting conflict and polarity are what creates the problem.

Until now, NASA's Helios 2 was the vessel that has got the closest to the sun: in 1976, it came within 27 million miles of the surface of the sun.

This is about to change, as NASA is planning on making its brand new Parker Solar Probe have a path that will take it 3.83 million miles away from the sun. The journey will have as main purpose to gather as much information as possible on the yellow star.

Many studies link noise pollution to:

• High blood pressure
• Sleep loss
• Heart disease

Just as noise pollution is bad for you, silence can actually benefit your brain.

We often fantasize about the day when things will finally go our way. We have highly positive expectations of the future, but once what we expected did not match our reality we feel hurt and lost.

Expectations frustrate us when we idealize a certain future but our actions and our behavior is not in accordance to what we were expecting for. Oftentimes our behavior falls short of our standards.

• The nature of beauty is a riddle in philosophy, with great figures engaging in trying to understand it, including Plato and Aristotle.
• An aesthetic attitude makes the engagement and appreciation of beauty using our senses, like taste, smell, vision or touch.
• Beauty can also be accessed in other ways like intellectually and through imagination.