Worlds Most Isolated Tribe – Enter Their Mysterious Island & They’ll Kill You! Introducing the Sentinelese people. They’ve been kicking around this beautiful island for a whopping 60,000 years. They inhabit a tiny island in The Indian Ocean which is estimated to be approximately the size of Manhattan. From the sky it appears to be an idyllic island with amazing beaches and a dense forest, but tourists or fishermen don’t dare to set foot on this island, due to its inhabitants’ fearsome reputation. When outsiders approach their island, they swarm the shoreline and rain down arrows. The Sentinelese are highly mysterious. Modern history is filled with sad sagas of indigenous peoples eradicated or decimated by diseases borne by European visitors. That has not happened to the Sentinelese. The tribe killed two men in 2006 who were fishing too close to their island, and have been known to fire arrows and fling rocks at low-flying planes or helicopters on reconnaissance missions. Contacting the Sentinelese is a criminal act. Resources: Jade Small More Posts Comments:
urticator.net - Excerpts from Uncleftish Beholding For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life. The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff. The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. Some of the higher samesteads are splitly. For although light oftenest behaves as a wave, it can be looked on as a mote—the lightbit.
Ervin Laszlo: Akasha Think "You can't solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the problem" -- Albert Einstein There is something new on the horizon -- a new kind of thinking. One that could solve the problem -- the entire complex conglomeration of challenges that makes our world unsustainable, intolerant, and prone to violence. This is not thinking out of the blue: It is thinking that has been around for thousands of years. In this column with my Akashic "A-team" I will review for you the principal dimensions of Akasha think -- the rediscovered revolutionary concept of life and universe, and freedom, wholeness, and wellbeing. Adam and Eve, Socrates and Plato, Constantine and the Crusaders, Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII, Hitler and Churchill, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King and Gandhi, yes even now Obama and Romney are giving us answers. Try Akasha think. Are you ready? What Is Akasha Consciousness -- For You? What is Akasha consciousness for you, a dream -- or a nightmare?
Countercurrents - Educate | Organize | Agitate Does the rise of English mean losing knowledge? By Matt Pickles . Image copyright Thinkstock Are we "losing knowledge" because of the growing dominance of English as the language of higher education and research? Attend any international academic conference and the discussion is likely to be conducted in English. That might make it easier for people speaking different languages to collaborate. A campaign among German academics says science benefits from being approached through different languages. Researchers whose first language is not English worry they have to subscribe to Anglo-American theories to get published in major international journals. Publishing in English According to the German linguist Ranier Enrique Hamel, in 1880 there were 36% of scientific publications using English, which had risen to 64% by 1980. But this trend has been further accentuated, so that by 2000, among journals recognised by Journal Citation Reports, 96% were in English. Image copyright AP 'Thought is formed by language' "Thought is formed by language.
Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value 1. What Has Intrinsic Value? The question “What is intrinsic value?” is more fundamental than the question “What has intrinsic value?,” but historically these have been treated in reverse order. For a long time, philosophers appear to have thought that the notion of intrinsic value is itself sufficiently clear to allow them to go straight to the question of what should be said to have intrinsic value. In his dialogue Protagoras, Plato [428–347 B.C.E.] maintains (through the character of Socrates, modeled after the real Socrates [470–399 B.C.E.], who was Plato's teacher) that, when people condemn pleasure, they do so, not because they take pleasure to be bad as such, but because of the bad consequences they find pleasure often to have. Many philosophers have followed Plato's lead in declaring pleasure intrinsically good and pain intrinsically bad. Suppose that you were confronted with some proposed list of intrinsic goods. 2. One final cautionary note. 3. 4. 5. Two final points. 6.
La montagna sacra - Prismo Fino al 1865, quando l’allora governatore inglese dell’India Andrew Scott Waugh le conferì il nome del suo predecessore, il cartografo George Everest, la montagna più alta del pianeta era conosciuta dalle popolazioni alle sue pendici come Chomolungma e Sagaramāthā. Che si sappia nessuno aveva mai tentato di scalarla, per nepalesi e tibetani era un luogo abitato da spiriti da tenere a debita distanza. E poi a che scopo? A quelle quote non cresce nulla, non è posto per l’uomo né per la vita in generale. Per cinquanta milioni di anni, dopo lo scontro tra la placca indiana e quella eurasiatica da cui proruppero le catene dell’Himalaya e del Karakoram (ovvero tutte le 109 montagne sopra i 7000 metri al mondo), l’Everest ha vissuto quindi in condizioni di splendido isolamento. Hillary e Norgay sulla cima dell'Everest. Che le cose non stessero proprio così divenne chiaro nella notte tra il 10 e l’11 maggio 1996. Vista da sud del massiccio dell'Everest. Hashtag: #montebianco. Sublime, circa 2015.
What Orwell can teach us about the language of terror and war At first sight, it seems hard to imagine a more unlikely pairing than George Orwell and Thomas Merton. Orwell had a profound dislike of Roman Catholic writers (though he accorded a grudging respect to Evelyn Waugh as a literary craftsman), and, had he encountered Merton – especially his earlier work – he would undoubtedly have recoiled. Not that Merton, whose centenary is this year, was a conventional religious writer. He became a Catholic in 1938 after a distinctly rackety youth, and spent most of the rest of his life as a Trappist monk in the US. But he wrote copiously, corresponding with a wide range of literary figures, including Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Czesław Miłosz, Boris Pasternak and several Latin American poets, some of whose work he also translated; another surprising friend was Joan Baez. This is where the conversation with Orwell might begin. “The Asian whose future we are about to decide is either a bad guy or a good guy.
Happiness 1. The meanings of ‘happiness’ 1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’ What is happiness? This question has no straightforward answer, because the meaning of the question itself is unclear. What exactly is being asked? Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the term: A state of mind A life that goes well for the person leading it In the first case our concern is simply a psychological matter. Having answered that question, a further question arises: how valuable is this mental state? In the second case, our subject matter is a kind of value, namely what philosophers nowadays tend to call prudential value—or, more commonly, well-being, welfare, utility or flourishing. Theories of well-being—and hence of “happiness” in the well-being sense—come in three basic flavors, according to the best-known taxonomy (Parfit 1984): hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. 2. 3. 4. 5.
The macabre truth of gun control in the US is that toddlers kill more people than terrorists do | Lindy West | Opinion This week, in my country, considered by some of its more embarrassing denizens to be the “greatest country in the world”, an outspoken Florida “gun rights” advocate left a loaded .45 calibre handgun in the back seat of her car and was promptly shot and wounded by her four-year-old child. Truly a pinnacle of human potential, much like the invention of paper in second-century BC China, or Aristotle holding forth in the Lyceum, or whoever first pointed out that Florida looks like America’s penis. What do you say about the outspoken Florida “gun rights” advocate who left a loaded .45 calibre handgun in the back seat of her car and was promptly shot and wounded by her four-year-old child? I take no pleasure in violence and pain. But I have no interest in letting Gilt off the hook. Growing up here myself didn’t prepare me for how distinctly, viscerally frightening it would be to raise children in a gun-obsessed nation. States with more guns have more gun deaths.
Words matter in ‘ISIS’ war, so use ‘Daesh’ The militants who are killing civilians, raping and forcing captured women into sexual slavery, and beheading foreigners in Iraq and Syria are known by several names: the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS; the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL; and, more recently, the Islamic State, or IS. French officials recently declared that that country would stop using any of those names and instead refer to the group as “Daesh.” The Obama Administration should switch to this nomenclature, too, because how we talk about this group is central to defeating them. Advertisement Whether referred to as ISIS, ISIL, or IS, all three names reflect aspirations that the United States and its allies unequivocally reject. Political and religious leaders all over the world have noted this. Muslim scholars around the world have denounced the group’s attempt to declare a caliphate. Why do they care so much?
Atul Gawande: How Do Good Ideas Spread? Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The first public demonstration of anesthesia was in 1846. The Boston surgeon Henry Jacob Bigelow was approached by a local dentist named William Morton, who insisted that he had found a gas that could render patients insensible to the pain of surgery. On October 16, 1846, at Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton administered his gas through an inhaler in the mouth of a young man undergoing the excision of a tumor in his jaw. Four weeks later, on November 18th, Bigelow published his report on the discovery of “insensibility produced by inhalation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. There were forces of resistance, to be sure. Sepsis—infection—was the other great scourge of surgery. Far from it. Did the spread of anesthesia and antisepsis differ for economic reasons?