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POPS10 ancient Greek writers you should know Archimedes was a mathematician, engineer, inventor, physicist and astronomer. He is known for the invention of The Archimedes’ Screw, a mechanism for moving water that is still in use today. He also calculated the value of pi very precisely. Archimedes discovered how to define the volume of irregular objects by submerging them in water. According to legend, this discovery made him run out on the street naked (he was so excited that he forgot to get dressed) and cry “Eureka!” – I have found it.
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POPSThe mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world " There’s no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind. Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections. For instance, we need more powerful ways to filter the information we get online, so that we don’t get a mass case of distractibility. Some people may fear that trying to fine-tune the brain-Internet connection is an impossible task. But if we’ve learned anything since Clark and Chalmers published “The Extended Mind,” it’s not to underestimate the mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world. "
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POPSSex is the ultimate absurdity Isn't it ironic that we all suffer today the consequences of how single celled organisms that lived a billion years ago choose to procreate? :-)
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POPSAn Infinite Loop in the Brain - Experiencing everything over and over again
"McGaugh and his colleagues concluded that Price's episodic memory, her recollection of personal experiences and the emotions associated with them, is virtually perfect. A case like this has never been described in the history of memory research, according to McGaugh. He explains that Price differs substantially from other people with special powers of recall, such as autistic savants, because she uses no strategies to help her remember and even does a surprisingly poor job on some memory tests. It's difficult for her to memorize poems or series of numbers -- which helps explain why she never stood out in school. Her semantic memory, the ability to remember facts not directly related to everyday life, is only average. Two years ago, the scientists published their first conclusions in a professional journal without revealing the identity of their subject. Since then, more than 200 people have contacted McGaugh, all claiming to have an equally perfect episodic memory. Most of them
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POPSThe future of science...is art "But before any of this can happen, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call, and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality. At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, "It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach." The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science
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POPSBombing the Moon Gives A New Meaning to Lunatics So how much does a metaphor weigh? A lot more than NASA thinks. The first man on the moon wasn't an American or a Russian, it was The Man in the Moon we all saw when we were kids, and somebody older showed him to us. That's the first man on the moon, her permanent resident, and now he's got a NASA rocket at his backside... They used to call the mentally ill lunatics. But now I wonder who the real lunatics are. And if there is water on the moon, what are we going to do with it? Grow moon-corn for ethanol until we kill the Earth? Such a great article it touched something, it really touched something more beautiful than finding water on the moon.
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POPSOne day I'll be trusting and spacious authentic and grounded and home I have been running so sweaty my whole life Urgent for a finish line And I have been missing the rapture this whole time of being forever incomplete...
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POPS"Zorba the Israeli" His most famous book, "Zorba the Greek," was published in 1946. Its appearance in English in the United States, in 1954, made its author a runaway success that exposed him to the rest of the world. Zorbas became an adored figure in Western culture, and his prescription for life, passions and animal instincts were idealized. He came to represent all of Greek culture. Kazantzakis wrote many books. "The Last Temptation of Christ" roused a storm of controversy when it appeared. (the film version of the book was released, directed by Martin Scorsese with a soundtrack composed by Peter Gabriel.) "It's the combination of the landscape and the people," Melzer a former philosophy professor says "Greeks have an endless ability to be happy, and we Israelis can only learn from them."
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POPSTomb May Hold Answer to How Much Shakespeare Actually Wrote Saunders insists it is worth exploring. “Fulke spent the equivalent of £300,000 today on a marble sarcophagus at St Mary's,” he told the Telegraph. “No man would build something like that and leave it empty. There is definitely something down there and we want to find out what it is.” Were the numerous works, including plays and poems, attributed to William Shakespeare really written by the actor from Stratford-upon-Avon? There have been plenty of scholars convinced otherwise, and candidates other than Greville include Sir Francis Bacon, fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe and others.
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POPSExtracted line by line from Hell by pro bono Attorneys
"Osama Abu Kabir is a Jordanian water truck driver who worked for the municipality of Greater Amman. After joining an Islamic missionary organization called Jama'at al-Tablighi, he traveled to Afghanistan, where he was detained by anti-Taliban forces and handed over to the US military. One of the justifications offered for his continued detention is that he was captured wearing a Casio digital watch, a brand supposedly favored by members of Al Qaeda because some models may be used as bomb detonators. Kabir remains at Guantánamo. IS IT TRUE? Is it true that the grass grows up again after the rain? Is it true that the flowers will rise up in the spring? Is it true that birds will migrate home again? Is it true that the salmon swim back up their stream? It is true. This is true. These are all miracles. But is it true that one day we'll leave Guantánamo Bay? Is it true that one day we'll go back to our homes? I sail in my dreams, I am dreaming of homes. To be with my children
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POPS"There is no question more important to us than our mortality" "A second possibility is more daring and probably much harder to become a reality. Combine human cloning with a mechanism to store all our memories in a giant database. Inject the clone of a certain age with the corresponding memories. Voil€! Will this clone be you? No one really knows. Certainly, just the clone without the memories won’t do. We are what we remember. To keep on living with the same identity, we must keep on remembering (unless you don’t like yourself). So, assuming such tremendous technological jump is even feasible, we could migrate to a new copy of ourselves.”
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POPSArs Psychiatrica This is a splendid blog site. Light and intelligent, it is packed full of great topic archives and links to numerous other great sites. Psychiatry, culture, art, philosophy. Something here for most people. Lovely collection of poetry too.
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POPSAnnabelle Lee OK, reading a poetry clip on CM got me started! This is one of my favorite Poems and Poe is incredibly dark and romantic and gothic. The beginning starts like a fairy tale and if you think they all end happily ever after the reader is in for a surprise. Poe uses strong uses of images in this poem. But his love for her is so powerful that he can't let go, he mourns, he dreams to her eyes; and every night he goes to her grave and lies down beside her. He was obviously a man who was madly in love and I think Poe felt the two of them were placed solely on Earth for each other. WOW.
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POPSThe Ten Oxherding Pictures - From The Manual of Zen Buddhism From The Manual of Zen Buddhism, D.T. Suzuki By Shubun (15th Century) a series of short poems and accompanying woodcuts that are intended to illustrate the stages of a Mahāyāna Buddhist practitioner's progression towards enlightenment, as well as his or her subsequent perfection of wisdom. The pictures first appeared in their present form, as drawn by the Chinese Chán (Zen) master Kuòān Shīyuǎn (廓庵師遠), in the 12th century, and may represent a Zen Buddhist interpretation of the ten stages experienced by a Bodhisattva as outlined in various Mahāyāna sūtras, most particularly the Avataṃsaka Sūtra.
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POPSSappho's poetry Her style was sensual and melodic; primarily songs of love, yearning, and reflection. Most commonly the target of her affections was female, often one of the many women sent to her for education in the arts. She nurtured these women, wrote poems of love and adoration to them, and when they eventually left the island to be married, she composed their wedding songs. That Sappho's poetry was not condemned in her time for its homoerotic content (though it was disparaged by scholars in later centuries) suggests that perhaps love between women was not persecuted then as it has been in more recent times. Especially in the last century, Sappho has become so synonymous with woman-love that two of the most popular words to describe female homosexuality--lesbian and sapphic have derived from her. Plato elevated her from the status of great lyric poet to one of the muses.
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POPSThe Bible Says... and Other Myths About Scripture The shortcomings of such a perspective are evident once we stop to think about it. The Bible, after all (by which I mean the Christian Bible) is an eclectic combination of many books produced over an enormous span of time and an enormous geographical range. It is constituted by 39 books written primarily in Hebrew, and a number of those books (notably the Psalms and Proverbs) might be further subdivided into the poems and pithy aphorisms they contain. Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians include a few more books in their Old Testaments than the Protestants do.
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