Homeboy Sandman: Words Are Weapons: Hip Hop's Self-Depreciating Lexicon. Around the neck of rap artist Saigon, you will find a bullet casing with a peace symbol on it. I had the opportunity to do two shows in Europe with Saigon over the summer and found him to be a very talented and compelling individual. On his latest release "The Greatest Story Never Told Chapter 2: Bread And Circuses" he is open about being in a transition between a life asleep and a life awake. I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him how this transition began when we were in Copenhagen. His answer remains with me to this day.
"My daughter came up to me after listening to Nicki Minaj and asked me what a menage was. She's three years old. " Wow. Words are powerful, aren't they? In How to Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, sci-fi novelist Philip K. It is beyond debate that the words chain, whip, trap, thug, crack, little, young, dog, pimp, bitch, hoe, and nigger are startlingly common in the hip hop embraced by media today. Just words. Who's little and young? Deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35012/1/431_ftp.pdf. Lena Dunham, Lana Del Rey, LCD Soundsystem, and the end of indie exceptionalism. I just watched this movie called The Comedy, and I need to talk about it. There’s a lot to say, but let’s start with the last scene: The main character, a potbellied and possibly sociopathic hipster doofus named Swanson (played by Tim Heidecker of the cult comedy institution Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!)
, has just biked to a desolate-looking New York City beach. The physical strain of this trip is emphasized by a tight close-up on Heidecker and his labored breathing, which sounds like a woolly mammoth having a heart attack. On the beach, Heidecker removes his sweat-stained shirt and unleashes the fleshy tapioca mudslide that’s been oozing around the edges of his too-tight clothing for the entire movie. He dives into the ocean. The waves appear rough but refreshing. Knowing how The Comedy ends shouldn’t discourage you from seeing it.
Weirdly enough, I loved The Comedy. Library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf. What's wrong with libertarianism. "The perfect liberty they seek is the liberty of making slaves of other people. " -- Abraham Lincoln Apparently someone's curse worked: we live in interesting times, and among other consequences, for no good reason we have a surplus of libertarians. With this article I hope to help keep the demand low, or at least to explain to libertarian correspondents why they don't impress me with comments like "You sure love letting people steal your money! " Good libertarians and the other kind This article has been rewritten, for two reasons. First, the original article had sidebars to address common objections. From several people's reactions, it seems that they never read these. They're now incorporated into the text.
Second, and more importantly, many people who call themselves libertarians didn't recognize themselves in the description. If you-- ...then this page isn't really addressed to you. The Un-Communism Does this sound exaggerated? Or here's Lew Rockwell on Rothbard (emphasis mine): Nice try. Jase's web space. Famous Plagiarists: Could it Happen Today? A recent article on Cracked.com entitled 5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism has gotten a lot of attention and a few people have emailed me about it. The five men on the list, Stephen Ambrose, T.S. Eliot, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Richard Owen and H.G. Wells are all well-known cases in plagiarism circles. You can even read more about then (save Owen), as well as dozens more, on Famous Plagiarists.
History is littered with famous authors, scientists and other important figures who we later discovered that their works were plagiarized and only a few cases of where they were actually punished for it. These thoughts always put writers on edge. Fortunately, the plagiarisms reported in the article, for the most part, took place in a different era. Stephen Ambrose Ambrose is the only case actually from the last 25 years. In 2001, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing large passages out of his then-new novel, the Wild Blue. Could it Happen Today? T.S. T.S. Very unlikely. Dr. Dr. Water clock. A display of two outflow water clocks from the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens. The top is an original from the late 5th century BC.
The bottom is a reconstruction of a clay original. A water clock or clepsydra (Greek κλέπτειν kleptein, 'to steal'; ὕδωρ hydor, 'water') is any timepiece in which time is measured by the regulated flow of liquid into (inflow type) or out from (outflow type) a vessel where the amount is then measured. Water clocks, along with sundials, are likely to be the oldest time-measuring instruments, with the only exceptions being the vertical gnomon and the day-counting tally stick.[1] Where and when they were first invented is not known, and given their great antiquity it may never be.
The bowl-shaped outflow is the simplest form of a water clock and is known to have existed in Babylon and in Egypt around the 16th century BC. Other regions of the world, including India and China, also have early evidence of water clocks, but the earliest dates are less certain. N. All Work and No Play Make the Baining the "Dullest Culture on Earth" The Baining—one of the indigenous cultural groups of Papua New Guinea—have the reputation, at least among some researchers, of being the dullest culture on earth.
Early in his career , in the 1920s, the famous British anthropologist Gregory Bateson spent 14 months among them, until he finally left in frustration. He called them “unstudiable,” because of their reluctance to say anything interesting about their lives and their failure to exhibit much activity beyond the mundane routines of daily work, and he later wrote that they lived “a drab and colorless existence.” Forty years later, Jeremy Pool, a graduate student in anthropology, spent more than a year living among them in the attempt to develop a doctoral dissertation. He too found almost nothing interesting to say about the Baining, and the experience caused him to leave anthropology and go into computer science (reference here ).
Fajans studied the Baining in the late 1970s and again in the early 1990s. Aurora shooting: If we want to prevent the next massacre, we need to cure our addiction to evil. In 1996, a man shot and killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania. If degrees of abjectness are assignable in such cases, for a massacre to unfold at Port Arthur was, for Australians, doubly awful. As Robert Hughes wrote in The Fatal Shore, his superlative history of the country’s origins as a penal colony: “Port Arthur has always dominated the popular historical imagination in Australia as the emblem of the miseries of transportation, ‘the Hell on Earth.’” Since the late 1970s, the ruins at Port Arthur, once the British Empire’s most pitiless labor camp, had been treated on the model of the European death camps; as a secular holy place, a site to wander in while meditating on how human beings subjugate and deform and generally thieve the dignity from other human beings. One of the first victims of the Port Arthur massacre, facing the barrel of the gun, said simply: “Not here.”
Narcissism, persecution, resentment—even as I write it, I think check, check, check. Responses | 2011 Annual Question | Edge. There's a lot of stuff in the world: trees, cars, galaxies, benzene, the Baths of Caracalla, your pancreas, Ottawa, ennui, Walter Mondale. How does it all fit together? In a word… Supervenience. (Pronounced soo-per-VEEN-yence. The verb form is to supervene.) Supervenience is a shorthand abstraction, native to Anglo-American philosophy, that provides a general framework for thinking about how everything relates to everything else. The technical definition of supervenience is somewhat awkward: Supervenience is a relationship between two sets of properties. This definition, while admirably precise, makes it hard to see what supervenience is really about, which is the relationships among different levels of reality.
The pixels and the image are, in a very real sense, the same thing. The concept of supervenience deserves wider currency because it allows us to think clearly about many things, not just about images and pixels. It would seem that humanists and scientists study different things. What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit? | 2011 Annual Question | Edge. James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples).
His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate. The Edge Question 2011 The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world. 165 CONTRIBUTORS (115,000 words): Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, V.S. Paul Jáuregui. Coursera. Graphing the history of philosophy « Drunks&Lampposts.
A close up of ancient and medieval philosophy ending at Descartes and Leibniz If you are interested in this data set you might like my latest post where I use it to make book recommendations. This one came about because I was searching for a data set on horror films (don’t ask) and ended up with one describing the links between philosophers. To cut a long story very short I’ve extracted the information in the influenced by section for every philosopher on Wikipedia and used it to construct a network which I’ve then visualised using gephi It’s an easy process to repeat. It could be done for any area within Wikipedia where the information forms a network.
First I’ll show why I think it’s worked as a visualisation. Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. It gets more interesting when we use Gephi to identify communities (or modules) within the network. It has been fairly successful. Simon. Navarasas. Human life is a rich fabric that is given colour and texture by the many happenings that shape it.
The mundane actions that characterize every day as well as the extraordinary happenings that make and keep our lives interesting are all threads that get woven together to form this tapestry. The one thing that is common to all these threads is the fact that they evoke feelings in us, we respond to them with our emotions before they can become a part of our internal life. Indeed, life can be thought of as a continuous sequence of emotions that arise in various contexts and circumstances. These emotions, or rasas, are what give life different hues, shades and colours. Thus it is not surprising that most performing art, which tries to present to the viewer a slice of human life focuses precisely on these rasas, or emotions in order to appeal to the audience. That rasas are the mainstay of performing art, or natya, is a fact that has been well-recognised for centuries now. Shringara Hasya Veera.