How the Invention of the Alphabet Usurped Female Power in Society and Sparked the Rise of Patriarchy in Human Culture by Maria Popova A brief history of gender dynamics from page to screen. The Rosetta Stone may be one of the 100 diagrams that changed the world and language may have propelled our evolution, but the invention of the written word was not without its costs. As Sophocles wisely observed, “nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” “By profession, I am a surgeon… I am by nature a storyteller,” Shlain tells us, and it is through this dual lens of critical thinking and enchantment that he examines his iconoclastic subject — a subject whose kernel was born while Shlain was touring Mediterranean archeological sites in the early 1990s and realized that the majority of shrines had been originally consecrated to female deities, only to be converted to male-deity worship later, for unknown reasons. Illustration by Giselle Potter for Gertrude Stein's posthumously published 'To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays.' Shlain frames the premise: Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
7 Must-Read Books on Time by Maria Popova What the second law of thermodynamics has to do with Saint Augustine, landscape art, and graphic novels. Time is the most fundamental common denominator between our existence and that of everything else, it’s the yardstick by which we measure nearly every aspect of our lives, directly or indirectly, yet its nature remains one of the greatest mysteries of science. Last year, we devoured BBC’s excellent What Is Time? and today we turn to seven essential books that explore the grand question on a deeper, more multidimensional level, spanning everything from quantum physics to philosophy to art. It comes as no surprise to start with A Brief History of Time — legendary theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s 1988 masterpiece, which is commonly considered the most important book in popular science ever published and one of our 10 essential primers on (almost) everything. Perhaps most powerful of all is the human hope and scientific vision of Hawking’s ending:
John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative by Maria Popova “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines “the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative”: The lecture is worth a watch in its entirety, below, if only to get a full grasp of Cleese’s model for creativity as the interplay of two modes of operating — open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to ponder possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision. A few more quotable nuggets of insight excerpted below the video. Creativity is not a talent. We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! Thanks, Simon
KNEE JOINT - ANATOMY & FUNCTION The knee is essentially made up of four bones. The femur, which is the large bone in your thigh, attaches by ligaments and a capsule to your tibia. Just below and next to the tibia is the fibula, which runs parallel to the tibia. The patella, or what we call the knee cap, rides on the knee joint as the knee bends. When the knee moves, it does not just bend and straighten, or, as it is medically termed, flex and extend. Figure 3: Cross Sectional View of Right Knee The knee joint also has a structure made of cartilage, which is called the meniscus or meniscal cartilage. To function well, a person needs to have strong and flexible muscles. For Additional Information on Meniscal Injuries: Figure 4: Right Knee There are two cruciate ligaments located in the center of the knee joint. For Additional Information on Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries: For Additional Information on Knee Injury Statistics: Knee Injury Statistics
The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You Really Are by Maria Popova The cause of and cure for the illusion of separateness that keeps us from embracing the richness of life. During the 1950s and 1960s, British philosopher and writer Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, offering a wholly different perspective on inner wholeness in the age of anxiety and what it really means to live a life of purpose. We owe much of today’s mainstream adoption of practices like yoga and meditation to Watts’s influence. Alan Watts, early 1970s (Image courtesy of Everett Collection) Though strictly nonreligious, the book explores many of the core inquiries which religions have historically tried to address — the problems of life and love, death and sorrow, the universe and our place in it, what it means to have an “I” at the center of our experience, and what the meaning of existence might be. Watts considers the singular anxiety of the age, perhaps even more resonant today, half a century and a manic increase of pace later:
Gospel of Thomas - Sayings of Jesus Now that you have finished reading The Present (with religion), the Bible and all other religious books and writings will make sense. You will see what I mean when you read this one. Eloheim means God/Life. Jesus said, "Everyone who seeks should continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will be troubled at the contemplation of Truth, but when he has passed through the time of trouble, he will be astonished at the brightness of the Light, for the Way of Truth is the Pathway to the Eternal Godhead, and the price of the beatific vision is the wringing of the soul. The person who desires to rise above all things must descend below all things, for the way to the heights passes through the depths of anguish, which generate the fires of Life. Jesus said, "If you say that the abode of the Gods is in the sky, the birds will arrive there before you. Jesus said, "I am the door; the person who enters by me will find Eternal bliss. Jesus said, "The Way of the Prophets is a trail of tears.
10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent by Maria Popova “Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.” Buried in various corners of the web is a beautiful and poignant list titled Some Rules for Students and Teachers, attributed to John Cage, who passed away twenty years ago this week. The list, however, originates from celebrated artist and educator Sister Corita Kent and was created as part of a project for a class she taught in 1967-1968. It was subsequently appropriated as the official art department rules at the college of LA’s Immaculate Heart Convent, her alma mater, but was commonly popularized by Cage, whom the tenth rule cites directly. RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month.
8 Punctuation Marks That Are No Longer Used | Keith Houston On the face of it, punctuation is not the most electrifying of subjects. A comma is a comma, a period is a period, and a semicolon is an argument waiting to happen. Look past squabbles over grammar, however, and punctuation's staid veneer peels back to reveal a seething, Darwinian struggle that has played out over two millennia of the written word. Though the period can claim an unbroken lineage stretching back to ancient Greece, and the quotation mark may boast of its roots in the early days of printing, for every venerable survivor there are countless other symbols that did not make the grade. Pilcrow The pilcrow (¶) is the poster child of abandoned punctuation marks. Evolving over the centuries into its modern reverse-P shape, the paragraphos came to be used to break texts into meaningful chunks such as paragraphs and sentences. Tironian et A modern writer seeking to abbreviate the word "and" will doubtless reach for the ampersand (&). Virgule Manicule Percontation Mark Interrobang Snark
How Long To Nap For The Biggest Brain Benefits Taking a nap, we’ve seen time and again, is like rebooting your brain. Everyone likes to get a quick nap in every now and then, but napping may be as much of an art as it is a science. The Wall Street Journal offers recommendations for planning your perfect nap, including how long to nap and when. The sleep experts in the article say a 10-to-20-minute power nap gives you the best “bang for your buck,” but depending on what you want the nap to do for you, other durations might be ideal. For a quick boost of alertness, experts say a 10-to-20-minute power nap is adequate for getting back to work in a pinch. For cognitive memory processing, however, a 60-minute nap may do more good, Dr. “If you take it longer than 30 minutes, you end up in deep sleep. Finally, the 90-minute nap will likely involve a full cycle of sleep, which aids creativity and emotional and procedural memory, such as learning how to ride a bike. The Scientific Power of Naps: Sources: Lifehacker, Huffington Post
How to Feel About Space and Time Maybe Not Existing New research, which turns out to not really be all that new, suggests that space and time do not exist. The research also suggests that a jewel (an “amplituhedron”) is the center of our universe and that from said jewel every feature of our known reality can be quantified. This is crazy, right? Like, why-the-hell-am-I-sitting-at-this-desk-right-now-as-I-tumble-through-a-universe-that-is-governed-by-features-that-are-incomprehensible-to-my-human-mind crazy. To find out, I spoke with Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard who is closely familiar and very much involved with this strand of research. Yeah. Space and time may not exist. So we’ve known for a long time that these ideas need to be modified, but it has never been clear how to modify the standard tools. “The new developments have provided a reformulation of quantum field theory, and they make the simplicity of predictions manifest, dramatically expanding our ability to make predictions for experiment in the future.”