100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!) In the spring of 2007, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, gave a legendary TED University talk: an ultra-fast-moving ride through the “100 websites you should know and use.” Six years later, it remains one of the most viewed TED blog posts ever. Time for an update? We think so. Below, the 2013 edition of the 100 websites to put on your radar and in your browser. To see the original list, click here. While most of these sites are still going strong and remain wonderful resources, we’ve crossed out any that are no longer functioning. And now, the original list from 2007, created by Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH. The mind is a guess.
What Motivates Sexual Promiscuity? This posting is in response to Dr. Steven Reiss's recent piece on motivational analysis vs. psychodynamic analysis of behavior, which I found exceedingly interesting and provocative. Interesting and provocative because he analyzes so-called sexual promiscuity, opposing his motivational view of such behavior to a psychodynamic or psychoanalytic one. And, for me, especially because he specifically mentions my former mentor, Rollo May's perspective on love and promiscuity. Since Dr. Promiscuity is, as you suggest, a culturally determined concept, but is formally defined, according to Webster, as including not only frequent but "indiscriminate" sexual behavior.
Having said that, it is easy for men to be accused of imposing a double standard when it comes to female sexuality: It's fine for men to be sexually promiscuous. For Rollo May, this motivational "drive" of which we are speaking is what he termed the daimonic . Can Our Brains Tell Us What Is Real? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images As I write these lines, an unknown choreography organizes the firing of millions of neurons in my brain; thoughts emerge and are expressed as words, typed on my laptop by a detailed coordination of eye and hand muscles. Something is in charge, an entity we loosely call our "mind. " My perception of the world around me, as modern cognitive neuroscience teaches us, is synthesized within different regions of my brain. What I call reality results from the integrated sum of countless stimuli collected through my five senses, brought from the outside into my head via my nervous system.
Cognition, the awareness of being here now, is a fabrication of countless chemical reactions flowing through myriad synaptic connections between my neurons. I am, and you are, a self-sustaining electrochemical network enacted across a web of biological cells. I am me and you are you and we are different, even if made of the same stuff. Rejecting Uncommon Beliefs: How Worldview Shapes our Experience | Blog | Noetic Now. As the legendary philosopher John Locke once said: “New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.” What limits our desire and capacity to take in new ideas – even when we hold an intention to transform and grow? How can we shift a paradigm that we see as flawed and incomplete without understanding the barriers to changing our minds and behaviors?
And how can we develop habits that allow us to explore and reveal our own biases and intolerance of ideas that refute our prevailing beliefs and opinions? These are tricky questions, but ones that are lighting up many science labs around the world. New discoveries and new thinking in neuroscience, social psychology, and anthropology offer provocative insights into the barriers to transformation. They show us that our views of reality are embedded largely in our unconscious mind.
Another study helps understand why this is so. +kenwilber.com - blog. The Tao of Twitter: The Spirit in the Machine (by Lama Surya Das) August 05, 2009 21:40 The Spirit in the Machine He who stands on tiptoe doesn't stand firm. He who rushes ahead doesn't go far. He who tries to shine dims his own light.... If you want to accord with the Tao, just do your job, then let go. ~Lao Tsu, “Tao Te Ching”, chapter 24 The TAO OF TWITTER is—like a standup comedian’s good one liner, haiku poetry, and the old fashioned singing telegram—rich with the magical power and incandescent immediacy of nowness, which is part and parcel of the power of Tao.
Though lacking the juicy face-to-face energy of more intimate interpersonal relations, this Paower—the evident, undeniable Tao-power surging in the very heart of the zeitgeist, like some sort of mystical relational growth hormone—is found flowing right though usi ndividually and collectively, coursing through our fingertips at this very moment. Without opening your door, you can open your heart to the world. The trouble with psychiatry. If you want an incisive critique of modern psychiatry, look no further than an excellent article in The New York Review of Books. It brilliantly captures the fights over diagnosis and the DSM, the problem of drug companies buying influence by paying physicians, and why the promises of drug treatments are often propped up with marketing hype. The article is well-informed, doesn’t mince words, and the author is no anti-psychiatry flak.
She’s Marcia Angell, ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the world’s leading medical journals. One of the leaders of modern psychiatry, Leon Eisenberg, a professor at Johns Hopkins and then Harvard Medical School, who was among the first to study the effects of stimulants on attention deficit disorder in children, wrote that American psychiatry in the late twentieth century moved from a state of “brainlessness” to one of “mindlessness.” Link to article in the NYRB (via 3QD). Culture Is the Secret to Guys' Happiness. Apocalypse 2011: What happens to a doomsday cult when the world doesn't end? - By Vaughan Bell. Preacher and evangelical broadcaster Harold Camping has announced that Jesus Christ will return to Earth this Saturday, May 21, and many of his followers are traveling the country in preparation for the weekend Rapture.
They’re undeterred, it seems, by Mr. Camping’s dodgy track record with end-of-the-world predictions. (Years ago, he argued at length that the reckoning would come in 1994.) We’ve yet to learn what motivates people like him to predict (and predict again) the end of the world, but there’s a long and unexpected psychological literature on how the faithful make sense of missed appointments with the apocalypse. The most famous study into doomsday mix-ups was published in a 1956 book by renowned psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues called When Prophecy Fails. The Seekers abandoned their jobs, possessions, and spouses to wait for the flying saucer, but neither the aliens nor the apocalypse arrived.
Helen Davey: Tales of Pan Am: 350 Eggs... But Who's Counting? Wherever we were in the world, we Pan Am stewardesses were expected to be able to think on our feet and often had to. Spread all over the world and far away from any supervision, there was nobody to ask when a crisis arose or things went awry. We were expected to be independent thinkers, to bring order out of chaos, and to look good doing it! The challenge was to be able to pull this off without passengers feeling any discomfort -- or even having any awareness that something was amiss. It was on a night flight from JFK to Buenos Aires, early in my 20-year career, when I faced one of my biggest challenges. Never having been a domestic goddess or a culinary genius (as some of my colleagues were), I felt proud that lately everything had gone smoothly when I worked the galley.
I must have been feeling especially daring that night because I volunteered to work the aft galley on our 707. All during the dinner service, I was trying to figure out my plan of attack on those eggs. The 51st Deer: Cooperation Vs. Competition | Wild Movement. I’ve always thought of competition as healthy, something to be promoted. As a kid I was ruthlessly competitive, playing every sport, every race, every insubstantial board game to win, to manically crush the other team into oblivion.
As Ricky Bobby says: If you’re not first your last, right? This is the popular mentally here in America, but after seeing the move I Am by Tom Shadyac, I’m not so sure it’s the best one. In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s the demise of our entire western civilization. Let’s look into this some more… The Nature of Competition One section of the movie I Am really stood out to me. Just look at the distribution of wealth around the world. In the current day, with all our technology and scientific advances, how can this be so one sided?
As Tom Shadyac suggests, it’s because we are the a modern tribe of greed-driven hoarders, and it all starts with competition. The Red Deer Experiment Okay, but is it possible that this was simply a coincidence? Photo credit: Eastop. How did debt and credit become the 'American way'? Taking on significant debt has become "normal" -- and even patriotic -- to some consumers, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. "How did America, a country once so indelibly marked with Puritan principles of self-discipline and thrift, become a nation so awash in personal debt? " ask authors Lisa Peñaloza (École des Hautes Études Commerciales du Nord -- EDHEC) and Michelle Barnhart (Oregon State University). The researchers interviewed 27 white, middle-class Americans before the 2008 financial crisis and found that even though consumers believe that they should limit their debt, they take on debt because doing so has become normal.
"As one participant put it, taking on debt is 'the American way,'" the authors write. For many participants, the disconnect between what consumers say they should do and what they actually do begins in young adulthood. Participants recognized the value of a good credit history and understood that they needed to use credit to build one. What the science of human nature can teach us. After the boom and bust, the mania and the meltdown, the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms.
Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow. You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. A few times a year, members of this class head to a mountain resort, carrying only a Council on Foreign Relations tote bag (when you have your own plane, you don’t need luggage that actually closes). Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as he hovers indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate selections, and you notice that his superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety.
Help comes from the strangest places. Ms. 5 Guides to Life from Cultural Luminaries. By Kirstin Butler Finding practical applications for philosophy, or what Ovid can teach us about sex. One of our favorite unattributed quotes goes as follows: “Life is a test. It is only a test. If this were your actual life, you would have been given better instructions.” The good news is that guidance is in fact out there, which is why we’ve put together a short list of reads (and one documentary) that gather the best of what we’ve collectively learned about the tricky art of living.
In 2011, we live in an age without existential anchors, a state that leaves many of us feeling adrift in our day-to-day lives. [A]nyone who hopes to enrich his or her life by experiencing it in the light of classic philosophical and literary works can hope to find something here. From Dante to David Foster Wallace, All Things Shining suggests that non-religious westerners look for sacraments in (sometimes surprising) new places. Running on the treadmill is an occasion for the following observation:
10 Historic Tweets That Captivated the World. Some tweets document history. Others make history. Others simply serve as a zeitgeist for how our culture and communication are evolving. Over the past several years, we've documented quite a few notable tweets, from the first Twitter marriage proposals to the first tweeting fetus. From the service's role in international politics to its part in devastating natural disasters, Twitter has become a huge part of how many of us communicate with one another, consume news, act as journalists and react to our own culture.