100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!) Entertainment Meet David Peterson, who developed Dothraki for Game of Thrones.
The mind is a guess. What Motivates Sexual Promiscuity? This posting is in response to Dr. 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. Rejecting Uncommon Beliefs: How Worldview Shapes our Experience. 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.”
+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. 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. 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. The 51st Deer: Cooperation Vs. Competition. 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? 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.
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. 5 Guides to Life from Cultural Luminaries. 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.