FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Wake Up!
You have slept for millions and millions of years.
Why not wake up this morning? --Kabir

There's nothing quite like the use of metaphors in English to confuse, awaken and stimulate thought. Take the title of this article for instance. Is it about food? Or about thought?

For those adventurous enough to type "Food for Thought" into the Google search engine, you'll find it's used for both--and more. One food-for-thought website provides a home for one-act plays. Another is a website that offers articles and a newsletter about Islam. 

A school chess organization uses "food for thought" to describe the software it sells. To top off the diversity of uses for the expression, one website features a book on "the Bhuddist practice of training the heart". The majority of sites listing the topic, however, deal either with edible food or ideas worth thinking about.

What got me started on this? Mailings nearly every other day from a friend who seems to search for news items or quotations that make people think, like the following:

Humanity by the Numbers If we could shrink the Earth's population to 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look like this: There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere (North and South) and 8 Africans. 51 would be female; 49 would be male 70 would be non-white; 30 white 70 would be non-Christian; 30 Christian 50 percent of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of only six people and all six would be citizens of the United States 80 would live in sub-standard housing 70 would be unable to read 50 would suffer from malnutrition Only 1 would have a college education No one would own a computer --Anonymous

Now that's food for thought! Much of this type of brain food can be found at MSDS Search. Don't mind the photo of the chimpanzee just below the headline, though the choice of graphic does give one pause to wonder.

Numerous other sources of famous and lesser-known quotations can be found on the Internet. Browsing through them on occasion can be both fun and thought provoking. The "fun" type of quotes come from wits like Oscar Wilde and comedians like Groucho Marx.

For an interesting and well-organized quotation site, visit Quoteland. You can find quotations by topic or author; and they have special sections on Sports, Literary quotations and Special Occasion quotes. If you need to identify a quote, Quoteland provides the means for that as well.

The Quotations Page, the oldest quotation site on the Web has a database of over 15,000 quotes, with Quotes of the Day and Motivational Quotes as well as collections of quotes by author and subject. Bartlett's, the classic source for familiar quotations, traces its collection of passages, phrases and proverbs to their sources in ancient and modern literature. 

While quotations might hold sway as "quick brain food", the Internet offers other kinds of thought provoking material, including fables, the stories of great men and women and the great books. 

Fables and fairy tales provide the source of amusement and horror from which children learn and adults use to teach and sometimes frighten their offspring. Stories like Aesop's fable about the boy who cried wolf have been used to teach children for centuries.

Aesop's many fables have been around since 650 BC, and are available on the Web. Perhaps the most fascinating approach can be seen in those illustrated and retold in both traditional and modern versions by students at the University of Massachusetts.

All of those thought-provoking tales of good and evil, right and wrong and told with such mastery, can be found on the Internet: the fairy tales and stories of Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm brothers, along with the Tales of the Arabian Nights.

Simply type the key words--Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson or Arabian Nights into your favorite search engine and the whole world of magical, mind-bending tales will open its doors to you. 

Two other paths to useful brain food can be accessed on the Internet. One is the passageway where you learn from others who have distinguished themselves, and the other involves digging into the great books of all times.

The first of these can be done by identifying successful people and probing the ideas and actions that made them successful. With plenty of information about men and women who have accomplished anything of significance, the Web has made this kind of probe easy. Simply type their names into Google to discover the many links to great thinkers and leaders.

Alexander Chislenko has developed a website devoted to Great Thinkers and Visionaries, both ancient and modern. In addition to classic figures like Galileo, DaVinci, Copernicus, Darwin and Newton, Chislenko's choices reflect a serious interest in moderns.

Some are scientists, like Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Linus Pauling and Carl Sagan, but he's also included futurists like Arthur Clark, Alvin Toffler and Buckminster Fuller along with a host of others with thought provoking ideas in various fields like Marshall McLuhan and Ayn Rand.

A number of online publications list people they believe have made great accomplishments. Some of these choose people who have achieved much in a particular field, like Fortune's outstanding business leaders. Forbes magazine publishes a number of lists like "The World's Billionaires", 100 Top Celebrities", The Forbes 400" and more.

The Spectator recently published an interesting list of those it nominated as the "12 greatest thinkers of our time". While some may disagree with their choices, those chosen have ideas that provide healthy food for thought. 

The list includes James Lovelock, E.O. Wilson, Martha Nussbaum, Li Hongzhi, Peter Singer, Noam Chomsky, Maulana Sayyid Abul-Ala Maududi, Jaques Derrida, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Antonio Negri and John Maynard Smith.

If you're familiar with more than two of those names, you're well ahead of those who don't keep up with the current who's who in the world. If you'd like to know why these 12 were chosen as great thinkers, type their names into your favorite search tool and enjoy your discoveries.

Always a good source of thought-provoking work, lives or ideas, the great books have enough food for thought in them to provide a university education. Because of the potential for eye strain, however, it's not a good idea to try to read the complete great books online even though they're available in full text. 

The Great Books Index has several different versions of its list along with notes and biographical sketches. The Great Books Index even has a Great Books Café, an active discussion area for the great books--thought provoking in itself. The site, hosted by Ken Roberts also has links to other great books sites.

My favorite great books list, chosen by the Committee of College Reading and included in Good Reading, offers an outstanding education in the classic thinkers from ancient to modern times. You'll find the list, organized by period, with links to summaries and a place to order the best priced paperback editions.

Brain Food: "The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein: it rejects it." --Peter Medawar, Nobel Laureate  It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. --Ansel Adams, photographer  The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. --Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." --Stephen Hawking  "You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."  --Eric Hoffer  "Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools." --Marshall McLuhan  "The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it." --Carl R. Rogers Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing. --Konrad Lorenz  Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. --Albert Einstein