BSc International Business Administration (IBA) 2014-2015

Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Consistently ranked among the top 10 business schools in Europe by the Financial Times (FT) Internationally accredited; among 1% of business schools with Triple Crown accreditation (EQUIS, AACSB, and AMBA) Among the top three Research-based universities in Europe

Bachelor of Science in International Business Administration (IBA): Three-year Bachelor of Science programme taught completely in English. International classroom: Our class of 2013-2016 consists of 40% Dutch and 60% international students from 58 different nationalities International exchange*, internship or minor. (*) See our renowned network of partner schools worldwide.

Career prospects: Strong corporate network: More than 400 companies recruit on campus. The top 10 employers of RSM MSc graduates are Vodafone, Shell, KPMG, Rabobank, Accenture, AkzoNobel, KPN, PwC, ABN Amro, and Bain & Company. Average gross starting salary (excluding benefits) of RSM MSc graduates in EEA countries is €3,986 and in non-EEA countries €2,905.

How to write an excellent motivation letter

An important part of the application procedure for the Bachelor programme in International Business Administration (IBA) is the motivation letter. However, for many applicants this part of the application can be very daunting. To help increase your self-confidence and relieve a bit of your application stress, we have put together this short article with background information and tips on how to write a solid motivation letter here below. For the format of your motivation letter (font, line spacing, max. pages etc), please read the general guidelines.

Why do we want a motivation letter?

The main goal of the motivation letter is to find out if you are the kind of student we are looking for in our IBA programme. Important programme characteristics are:

IBA is an international programme
IBA students are high performers

These characteristics are fundamental success factors of the IBA programme. It is therefore of vital importance that only students who have a real interest in studying in an international setting and are willing to actively contribute to the programme are admitted.

The international dimension

The importance of the international dimension of the IBA programme explains why the first of the four items covered in the motivation letter asks you to: “Tell us about your international background”: where were you born, where have you lived, what is your nationality, where did you go to school, in what kind of international activities have you participated. You can also write about what you feel you can add to the international dimension of the programme.

Students without an international background may find this question to be quite disheartening and worry that this will put them at a disadvantage. Our advice here is not to worry. If you do not have an international background, you don’t have it and you cannot be blamed for that. You may have participated in other international activities, like back-packing in Australia, a summer language course in Spain or maybe you attended an international or a bilingual secondary school. All of these types of activities can be used as examples of your “international drive.”

Why IBA?

The second item we would like you to address in your motivation letter is your ambition to study InternationalBusiness Administration. Some questions to ask yourself are:
Why do you want to study a business programme (and not for instance Chemistry)
Why are you attracted to an international business programme? For our Dutch applicants it is very important to explain your motivation for choosing the International, English language programme as opposed to the Dutch language programme.

Why IBA at RSM?

In the third question you will be asked to elaborate on why you would like to be chosen to participate in the IBA programme at RSM as opposed to another university. We are interested in this because it has been proven that students who made a deliberate, well-thought out study choice, perform better and contribute more to the level of the programme. For RSM it is clear that ambitious and high-performing students influence each other in a positive way.

Your future plans

In the final question we ask you to tell us about your plans for the future. Honestly speaking, you cannot have a ‘wrong’ plan for the future and as a young person you are not to blame if you do not have any concrete ideas at this point in your life. However, we still like to trigger your imagination with this question.

In conclusion, the motivation letter for the IBA programma is an important part of your application package. It is something to be taken seriously, but also something to have fun with. Tell us who you are, what your dreams and motivations are and most importantly, why you think you should be selected for the most prestigious IBA programme in the Netherlands! http://issuu.com/rsmpublications/docs/iba_2014-2015?e=7415166/5322851&_cldee=ZGlyZWN0b3JzQG1hcmt0d2FpbnNjaG9vbC5ybw%3d%3d

On Recreative (sic!) Writing...

Recreative Writing. Ce este arta? Bogdan Ghiu Evul Media 03.11.2013 De un mare succes în lumea civilizaţiei nordic-occidentale actuale autobaricadate, self-forcluse de la restul (de) Real al lumii, adică în lumea în care şi noi trăim incluşi ca "lume a doua", lume producătoare de categorii, norme şi criterii de realitate-insulă-continent în oceanul de Real, de un mare succes aşadar în această lume înalt civilizată se bucură învăţarea continuă, adică autoperfecţionarea personală a subiectului înţeleasă însă doar ca achiziţionare de abilităţi dintre cele mai diverse, de la gătit pînă la iluminare. Iar în interiorul acestei palete de învăţături-hobby, de ocupare cu folos, prin mărfuri specifice, a timpului liber pre-plătit care nu trebuie să rămînă neproductiv, de un succes constant se bucură şi cursurile de aşa-zis "Creative Writing", formulă (ne-)tradusă, la noi, prin "scris creativ" sau "scriere creativă". "Creativă" însă de ce? Şi, mai ales: de ce ar fi atras cineva să înveţe să scrie ca un scriitor, printr-o evident falsă divulgare-democratizare a "secretelor" artei? Toţi fotografi, toţi scriitori, toţi artişti? Dacă ceea ce atrage aici e tocmai, cum se spune, diferenţa, excepţia, excelenţa, adică arta, cum ar putea crede un adevărat pasionat, un adevărat amator de artă că arta se poate învăţa sau ceea ce va ajunge să producă el este la fel de artă ca şi arta pe care o admiră? Sau cumva tocmai admiraţia creează dorinţa de a imita, de a te lăsa contaminat, de a fi "ca"? Reiau însă întrebarea: de ce ar trebui cineva să înveţe să scrie ca un scriitor, cînd este clar că astfel de cursuri, oricît de bine şi de profesionist ar fi ţinute, întreţin o impostură de fond? Pentru scris nu există decît şcoală individuală, şcoli individualizate, furt personal(izant). Mult mai utile, cu adevărat utile, şi în sfîrşit cinstite, în loc de "cursuri de scriere" ar fi nişte seminarii de citit. Mai exact: nişte ateliere de întrebuinţare a artei, detranspunere a incitaţiilor şi a invenţiilor tehnice ale artei în registrul şi cu scopul re-scrierii personale. De ce să vrei să devii (ca) un scriitor sau (ca) un artist, cînd de fapt marele "mesaj" al tuturor scriitorilor şi artiştilor este eliberarea omului, rescrierea, prin semne specifice (conform pragmatismului semiotic intuit de către Peirce), a omului? E vorba de o confuzie întreţinută, de o nevoie deturnată şi contrafăcută, anume prost înţeleasă: de un adevăr transformat, prin "răsucire", în minciună. Să înveţi artă e important, dar nu (doar sau în primul rînd) ca să produci la rîndul tău marfa numită "artă", ci ca să te re-formezi, să te creezi. În loc de re-creare, literatura este însă predată ca re-creaţie, potenţialul exploziv, absolut subversiv al scrisului fiind astfel captat, normat, normalizat şi dirijat spre propagarea imitativă a unei activităţi de piaţă. Că literatura, scrisul literar prelungeşte tocmai această incitare la eliberare e adevărat, "învăţarea" şi propagarea ideii de literatură întreţinînd, cel puţin teoretic, acest ferment - care, însă, prin  acelaşi gest, cu cealaltă mînă pe sub mînă, tocmai pentru că literatura e auto-metaforă, dublu limbaj, este inevitabil neutralizat şi deviat. Scrisul poate fi eliberator căci prin scris fiecare se poate obiectiva, auto-reifica, auto-manipula, distruge, reforma. Merită să învăţăm, larg social, să scriem, dar nu ca să producem "literatură", ci ca să ne producem pe noi înşine prin intermediul tehnic al scrisului literar. Scris literar fără scriere (doar) de literatură. Practicare a literarităţii nu (doar) pentru a produce literatură. Realizare a literaturii prin ieşirea din ea. Literatura-proces împotriva literaturii-produs. A dori să fii scriitor, doar scriitor, înseamnă a deprecia însăşi ideea de scriitor. Mulţi vrem să devenim scriitori sau artişti tocmai pentru că ego scriptor sau ego pictor este o ipostază dezirabilă a subiectului tehnic, etic, spiritual eliberator, a subiectului creator de tehnici de auto-creaţie. Numai că sîntem încurajaţi să ne înţelegem greşit, infim deviat, dorinţa, care în acest caz este expresia unei nevoi de fond. Metafora pur literară a foii de hîrtie este utilă aici: doar grosimea imaterială, în ea însăşi deci metaforică, dublă natură, a unei foi de hîrtie, a paginii înseşi (devenită însă cu totul imaterială, metaforă anulată deci, în cazul lecturii digitale, în care avem tot timpul, fără volum, o singură pagină în faţă) desparte, faţă-verso, eliberarea de aservire în cazul arhetipal al literaturii, al scrisului. De aceea a şi rămas atît de important să "întoarcem pagina". Marele merit, marea acţiune a artei este de grad secund, constă în a incita la transpunerea ei (meta-metaforică şi arhi-simboliocă) în registru practic, etic, existenţial, ca tehnici de existenţă. Altfel nu văd ce sens, ce interes ar mai avea să vorbim de "marea artă", de ce am mai citi "marea literatură". În acelaşi timp însă, aşa cum de mult remarca şi analiza M. Foucault în "Ce este un autor?", literatura îşi codifică propriul uz: cu o mînă (stînga, stîngaci) nu poate să nu fie subversivă, adică să ne transmită, viral adică vital, nevoia de a ne re-forma prin scris, de a ne scrie (pe noi nouă), dar pe de altă parte, cu cealaltă mînă (dreapta) ne dă peste mînă şi îşi dă peste propria mînă închizîndu-se într-o producţie de ficţiune-marfă, de "poveste"-spectacol, invitîndu-ne s-o consumăm pasiv-compulsiv în loc să-i dăm literal şi în toate sensurile curs literalizîndu-i, realizîndu-i meta-metafora, metaforicitatea. Arta trezeşte arta. Deci ce este arta? Arta este arta de a trezi arta transmiţînd însăşi ideea de artă. Arta nu este decît o metaforă a Marii Arte, iar artistul, o metaforă a omului-subiect, care se autosubiectivează ca autor al vieţii-artă (adică ne-date, ne-"naturale"). Arta invită la transgresiune, în primul rînd însă la transgresarea (transpunerea) ei înseşi, la utilizarea metaforei prin promovarea sensului literal-practic. Literarul este doar invitaţie la literalizare, la spiritual ca utilizare de sine pentru eliberare şi ameliorare. Curs metonimic (materializant) dat incitaţiei-invitaţiei metaforice. Nu cum să scriem "literatură" (sau cum să pictăm "pictură"), ci cum să ne eliberăm reformîndu-ne prin virtuţile tehnetice, etic performative (creatoare, adică, doar de semne interpretabile, de "machete" fără pretenţii de realitate "naturală"), ale scrisului literar - numai asta ar fi, de fapt, de învăţat, de dezbătut, de practicat. Metafora e dublu limbaj care transmite ocolit că nu putem transmite decît ocolit că nu sîntem decît metafore, că nu existăm decît în metaforă, care trebuie realizată însă literal şi materializată, practicată metonimic, şiîn simbol, care nu există decît pentru a reaminti datoria, deci misiunea de a-l "realiza"-anula indicial. Marea invenţie a artei este însuşi "artistul", însuşi "scriitorul" ca erou eliberator prin tehnici nereificate, necaptate tehnologic, neindustrializate căci neproduse în logica logocentrică a raţionalismului ştiinţific (abstractizant), ci prin raţionalităţi (materialităţi), tocmai, non-lingvistice (literatura scrie ne-scripturalul), refulate, ocultate, discreditate, "sălbăticite", devenite prin urmare alternative. Arta, literatura reinjectează, fantomal, Real în realitatea tehno-ştiinţifică, adică metafizic-dominator impusă. Indicialitatea (Llosa: "uite-aici, uite-aşa!" - ghici ce?) re-vine să bîntuie simbolul, închizîndu-i cercul, împlinindu-i inelul (infinit hermeneutic), adică suprimîndu-l. Sfînt scop şi armă sieşi, artistul-scriitor este omul care se autoinventează ca erou-artist incitîndu-ne astfel să ne eliberăm scriindu-ne pe noi înşine, autoscriindu-ne printr-o autoreflexivitate nu narcisic autodescriptivă ("autoficţiune", "egoproză"), ci politic autoperformativă (creatoare de "roluri", de subiectivităţi, de "ficţiuni juridice"). Sensul publicării de literatură, al literaturii ca act public, de publicare a tot ce este mai intim (metaforicitate structurală, de fond), ar fi aşadar mult mai bine să fie, deci nu poate fi (asta pentru a monstra trecerea ilicită, la negru, adică profund umană, nu înalt ştiinţifică, de la dezirabil la normativ!) decît scrierea intimă, lucrarea internă, de sine, inventarea de sine ca semn şi subiectivitate funciar "literară", autoperformarea ludic, convenţional-idealizantă ca ficţiune suprem politică (politicul fiind acţiune prin semne, acţiune prin ficţiune, domnie conştientă de sine, deci auto-performativă, a convenţionalităţii simbolic-reprezentative). Materială (literală) sau metaforică: reinventare pragmatică prin semne.

On scary maths...

Homer Simpson's scary maths problems

By Simon SinghScience writer

For a character living in two dimensions, grasping the idea of life in 3D can be tough - especially if the character in question is Homer Simpson. But one Halloween episode of The Simpsons forces him to confront the concept, and gives viewers a mathematical workout too.

Eighteen years ago, the writers of The Simpsons celebrated Halloween with one of their traditional Treehouse of Horror episodes, which included three short stories. After Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores and Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace, viewers were treated to Homer³, which contains the most intense five minutes of mathematics ever to appear on prime time television.

For many people, mathematics is more terrifying than being attacked by an army of zombies, werewolves and vampires, but in this case the various equations were included because the writer of Homer³, David S Cohen, is a fan of numbers.

The storyline involves Homer diving through a portal and entering a peculiar three-dimensional universe. When he senses his new extra-dimensionality, Homer says: "What's going on here? I'm so bulgy. My stomach sticks way out in front."

It is a particularly memorable plot, because the animation changes from the classic Springfield-style to futuristic computer graphics when Homer enters the portal. It is within this computer-generated landscape that eagle-eyed number nerds (like myself) can discover Cohen's mathematical nuggets.

For example, in one scene, the letters P and NP can be seen over Homer's right shoulder. Although these three letters would have made no sense to most viewers, they are a deliberate nod towards a statement about one of the most important unsolved problems in theoretical computer science. Indeed, this is such a weighty puzzle that there is a reward of $1m (£623,000) for whoever solves the mystery.

P stands for polynomial and NP for non-deterministic polynomial. One way to think about these terms is that P-type problems are essentially easy to solve, while NP-type problems are difficult.

The question for mathematicians is whether NP-type problems are fundamentally hard, or whether there might be a trick that could turn these hard problems into easy P-type problems.

It is surprising to find a reference to P- and NP-type problems in a television sitcom, but not when the writer is Cohen, because he studied them while doing his master's degree at the University of California in Berkeley.

Meanwhile, back in Springfield, Professor Frink is giving Chief Wiggum and others an impromptu introduction to the mathematics of higher dimensions in order to explain what happened to Homer when he disappeared through the portal. Of course, the notion of a third dimension is baffling from Chief Wiggum's two-dimensional perspective, so Frink draws a diagram:

Professor Frink: Here is an ordinary square.

Chief Wiggum: Whoa, whoa! Slow down, egghead!

Professor Frink: But suppose we extend the square beyond the two dimensions of our universe along the hypothetical z-axis... There.

Everyone: [gasps]

Professor Frink: This forms a three-dimensional object known as a cube, or a Frinkahedron in honour of its discoverer.

Perhaps the most striking piece of mathematics in Homer³ is a reference to Fermat's last theorem, the most notorious problem in the history of mathematics.

According to the 17th Century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, it is impossible to find two numbers raised to the 12th power that equal a third number raised to the 12th power, but this equation from Homer³ seems to defy Fermat's claim:

1,782¹² + 1,841¹² = 1,922¹²

Indeed, a quick check on your phone calculator will suggest that Homer has proven Fermat to be wrong. However, this is not an actual solution, but merely a so-called near-miss solution, which means that only a highly accurate calculating device (with more decimal places than the display on the average calculator) will see the slight imbalance in the equation. In other words, Cohen was playing a Halloween prank on viewers.

Continue reading the main story

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• The story behind the hidden number 1,729

It was this bit of mathematical tomfoolery that first caught my attention when I watched Homer³, and I only spotted the other references on second and third viewings. In time, I realised that there were several mathematical writers on The Simpsons, and indeed there are many other episodes alluding to number theory and geometry.

However, as yet I have failed to discover any appearance by the number 1,000,000,000,000,066,600,000,000,000,001. This is a great shame, as it is a terrifying number and would be particularly suitable for a Halloween episode of The Simpsons.

It is known as Belphegor's prime. It is a prime number because nothing will divide into it except one and the number itself, and it is named after Belphegor (one of the seven princes of hell) because it has 666 at its heart and 13 zeroes either side of the number of the beast.

Perhaps the writers of The Simpsons are saving it for next year's Treehouse of Horror episode.

Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

Simon Singh is the author of The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets.

The Origins of Halloween

Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs; the holiday, All Saints’ Day, incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a secular, community-based event characterized by child-friendly activities such as trick-or-treating. In a number of countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to usher in the winter season with gatherings, costumes and sweet treats.

Ancient Origins of Halloween

Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of "bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

Halloween Comes to America

Celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups as well as the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday.

Today's Halloween Traditions

The American Halloween tradition of "trick-or-treating" probably dates back to the early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called "soul cakes" in return for their promise to pray for the family's dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as "going a-souling" was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food, and money.  

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

Halloween Superstitions

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today's Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today's trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl's future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands' initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands' faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of course, whether we're asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the good will of the very same "spirits" whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

Happy Birthday, Brainiac!

Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living

by Maria Popova

Reflections on how to keep the center solid as you continue to evolve.

On October 23, 2006, I sent a short email to a few friends at work — one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college — with the subject line “brain pickings,” announcing my intention to start a weekly digest featuring five stimulating things to learn about each week, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless piece of poetry. “It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read,” I promised. This was the inception of Brain Pickings. At the time, I neither planned nor anticipated that this tiny experiment would one day be included in the Library of Congress digital archive of “materials of historical importance” and the few friends would become millions of monthly readers all over the world, ranging from the Dutch high school student who wrote to me this morning to my 77-year-old grandmother in Bulgaria to the person in Wisconsin who mailed me strudel last week. (Thank you!) Above all, I had no idea that in the seven years to follow, this labor of love would become my greatest joy and most profound source of personal growth, my life and my living, my sense of purpose, my center. (For the curious, more on the origin story here.)

Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'I'll Be You and You Be Me' by Ruth Krauss, 1954. Click image for more.

Looking back today on the thousands of hours I’ve spent researching and writing Brain Pickings and the countless collective hours of readership it has germinated — a smile-inducing failure on the four-minute promise — I choke up with gratitude for the privilege of this journey, for its endless rewards of heart, mind and spirit, and for all the choices along the way that made it possible. I’m often asked to offer advice to young people who are just beginning their own voyages of self-discovery, or those reorienting their calling at any stage of life, and though I feel utterly unqualified to give “advice” in that omniscient, universally wise sense the word implies, here are seven things I’ve learned in seven years of making those choices, of integrating “work” and life in such inextricable fusion, and in chronicling this journey of heart, mind and spirit — a journey that took, for whatever blessed and humbling reason, so many others along for the ride. I share these here not because they apply to every life and offer some sort of blueprint to existence, but in the hope that they might benefit your own journey in some small way, bring you closer to your own center, or even simply invite you to reflect on your own sense of purpose.

Illustration from 'Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children's Literature 1920-35.' Click image for more.

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose todaydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
   Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
5. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowedfrom the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

One of Maurice Sendak's vintage posters celebrating the joy of reading. Click image for more.

Then, just for good measure, here are seven of my favorite pieces from the past seven years. (Yes, it is exactly like picking your favorite child — so take it with a grain of salt.)

Donating = Loving

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On Bushisms, Malapropisms and other "suppositories of wisdom"

by Bogdan Lepadatu

Notwithstanding Elan Dresher's utilitarian pamphlet mocking all attempts at codifying Standard English linguistic forms, and beyond other axiologically neutral (allegedly) critiques of those bold enough to point an accusing finger at Bushisms, malapropisms and other semantic or linguistic errors (ranging from split infinitives up to and including the so-called Oxford comma) that are ventilating the world's most spoken language (Yes, Bad English!), one is left to contemplate this...

Lets one forgets similar "suppositories of wisdom"...

On boosting your creativity

Ray Bradbury on How List-Making Can Boost Your Creativity

By: Maria Popova

How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.

Susan Sontag argued that lists confer value and guarantee our existence. Umberto Eco saw in them “the origin of culture.” But lists, it turns out, might be a remarkably potent tool for jostling the muse into manifesting — a powerful trigger for that stage of unconscious processingso central to the creative process, where our mind-wandering makes magic happen.

In Zen in the Art of Writing (public library), one of these ten essential books on writing, Ray Bradbury describes an unusual creative prompt he employed in his early twenties: He began making long lists of nouns as triggers for ideas and potential titles for stories:

These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.

The lists ran something like this:

THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

Bradbury would later come to articulate his conviction that the intuitive mind is what drives great writing, but it was through these lists that he intuited the vitalpattern-recognition machinery that fuels creativity. Echoing Einstein’s notion of“combinatory play,” Bradbury considers the true value of his list-making:

I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds. Glancing over the list, I discovered my old love and fright having to do with circuses and carnivals. I remembered, and then forgot, and then remembered again, how terrified I had been when my mother took me for my first ride on a merry-go-round. With the calliope screaming and the world spinning and the terrible horses leaping, I added my shrieks to the din. I did not go near the carousel again for years. When I really did, decades later, it rode me into the midst of Something Wicked This Way Comes.

So he went on making lists, hoping they’d spark these fruitful associations that the rational mind tucks away in the cabinets of “useless knowledge”:

THE MEADOW. THE TOY CHEST. THE MONSTER. TYRANNOSAURUS REX. THE TOWN CLOCK. THE OLD MAN. THE OLD WOMAN. THE TELEPHONE. THE SIDEWALKS. THE COFFIN. THE ELECTRIC CHAIR. THE MAGICIAN.

Out on the margin of these nouns, I blundered into a science fiction story that was not a science-fiction story. My title was “R is for Rocket.” The published title was “King of the Grey Spaces,” the story of two boys, great friends, one elected to go off to the Space Academy, the other staying home.

Bradbury, who has since shared timeless wisdom on withstanding the storm of rejection, recalls:

The tale was rejected by every science-fiction magazine because, after all, it was only a story about friendship being tested by circumstance, even though the circumstance was space travel. Mary Gnaedinger, at Famous Fantastic Mysteries, took one look at my story and published it. But, again, I was too young to see that “R is For Rocket” would be the kind of story that would make me as a science-fiction writer, admired by some, and criticized by many who observed that I was no writer of science fictions, I was a “people” writer, and to hell with that!

I went on making lists, having to do not only with night, nightmares, darkness, and objects in attics, but the toys that men play with in space, and the ideas I found in detective magazines.

Susan Sontag's list of her favorite things, illustrated. Click image for details.

But more than merely sharing the amusing story of his youth’s quirky habit, Bradbury believes this practice can be enormously beneficial for any writer, both practicing and aspiring, as a critical tool of self-discovery:

If you are a writer, or hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you discoveryou, even as I flopped around and finally found me.

He offers himself as a testament:

I began to run through those lists, pick a noun, and then sit down to write a long prose-poem-essay on it.

Somewhere along about the middle of the page, or perhaps on the second page, the prose poem would turn into a story. Which is to say that a character suddenly appeared and said, “That’s me”; or, “That’s an idea I like!” And the character would then finish the tale for me.

It began to be obvious that I was learning from my lists of nouns, and that I was further learning that my characterswould do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads, which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.

He urges the aspiring writer:

Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness … speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page…

Shortly before his death, Bradbury speaks to his official biographer, Sam Weller — who also conducted Bradbury’s lost Comic Con interview — and revisits the subject of list-making in a Paris Review interview:

Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them. When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.

(That’s exactly what Roland Barthes did in 1977, to a delightful effect.)

Zen in the Art of Writing remains a must-read in its entirety, and a fine addition to the collected advice of great writers. Complement it with Bradbury onwriting with joy and this fantastic 1974 documentary on his fantastical mind.

For more wisdom on writing, see Stephen King on the art of “creative sleep,”Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, Walter Benjamin’s thirteen doctrines,H. P. Lovecraft’s advice to aspiring writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s letter to his daughter, Zadie Smith’s 10 rules of writing, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.