The First and Last Freedom - Jiddu Krishnamurti. The First and Last Freedom Foreword By Aldous Huxley MAN IS AN amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds - the given and the homemade, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols. In our thinking we make use of a great variety of symbol-systems - linguistic, mathematical, pictorial, musical, ritualistic. Without such symbol-systems we should have no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, not so much as the rudiments of civilization: in other words, we should be animals.
Symbols, then, are indispensable. But symbols - as the history of our own and every other age makes so abundantly clear - can also be fatal. Consider, for example, the domain of science on the one hand, the domain of politics and religion on the other. Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner. In recent years logicians and semanticists have carried out a very thorough analysis of the symbols, in terms of which men do their thinking. 10 civilizations that mysteriously disappeared | Smashing Tops. There are numberless civilizations in the history of human kind that entirely disappeared. They left behind traces of their flourishing cultures – breathtaking monuments, sculptures, wall paintings and so many other treasures -which did not allow time to forget them. On contrary, as centuries passed by, more and more questions arose and curiosity overwhelmed us.
We constantly struggle to find out the answer of three essential questions: ‘How did they live?’ ‘What did they know?’ And most importantly ‘Why did their civilization die? Solving these puzzles may save us from sharing their fate… 1. The Mayans were one of the greatest peoples that ever existed. 2. This civilization, located in the area of nowadays Pakistan existed since 3300 BC up to 1800 BC. 3. This Pre-Columbian people lived between 1500 BC and 400 AD in the area now occupied by South-Central Mexico. 4. The Aksumite Empire occupied Northeastern Africa and it flourished from 4th century BC until 1st century AD. 5. 6. 7. 8. STRANDBEEST. How To Build The World's Best Paper Airplanes. Bananas and Monkeys. Original source unknown.
(But the story appears to have some basis in fact.) Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result - all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Now, put away the cold water. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted. Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water.
And that, my friends, is how company policies are made. Return to Jim Huggins' Humor Page. A Rodent With a Robot Brain? It's True. Israeli researchers are taking the concept of "artificial intelligence" to an entirely new level. A team at Tel Aviv University has deveoped a tiny, rodent-sized artificial cerebellum that can be implanted onto the skull of a rat. In experiments, the AI brain enables a rat with brain damage to function normally. The robotic cerebellum includes a computer chip, which is electrically wired to the rat's brain with electrodes. The cerebellum, which is the part of the brain that normally coordinates movement, interprets sensory info from the rat's body, then communicates messages to the brain stem and back out to the rest of the body.
So why do Israeli researchers want to create robo-rats? I for one welcome the age of half-man, half-robot.