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.
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.
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.
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?
Pourquoi la non-violence est la force la plus puissante dont dispose l'humanité? - Zango Media Articles Publié le 11 janvier 2015 | par Thibault G. Depuis quelque temps déjà, on peut entendre ici et là que « l’action non-violente ne fonctionne plus », qu’elle « ne suffit plus » face à la violence subtile des gouvernants, verbale de certain médias ou physique de la part des forces de l’ordre ou de certains ignorants. La non-violence n’est pas une forme de révolte « à la mode » qui permet de manifester son mécontentement « sans trop se mouiller » ou une forme de contestation que l’on utilise « jusqu’à ce que ça ne suffise plus ». “La Liberté acquise par l’effusion de sang ou la fraude n’est pas la Liberté.” À l’inverse, la non-violence, de par sa nature même, n’impose rien mais conduit, montre, éduque patiemment jusqu’à ce que le principe prôné soit devenu une évidence. “L’Humain comme animal est violent, il est non violent comme esprit.” Lorsque je refuse d’obéir à une loi qui répugne ma conscience, j’utilise ma volonté au risque de souffrir. La non-violence implique des devoirs.
20 words that once meant something very different Words change meaning over time in ways that might surprise you. We sometimes notice words changing meaning under our noses (e.g., unique coming to mean “very unusual” rather than “one of a kind”) — and it can be disconcerting. How in the world are we all going to communicate effectively if we allow words to shift in meaning like that? The good news: History tells us that we’ll be fine. Nice: This word used to mean “silly, foolish, simple.” We’re human. Watch Anne Curzan’s TED Talk to find out what makes a word “real”. Malthusian Theory of Population Thomas Robert Malthus was the first economist to propose a systematic theory of population. He articulated his views regarding population in his famous book, Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), for which he collected empirical data to support his thesis. Malthus had the second edition of his book published in 1803, in which he modified some of his views from the first edition, but essentially his original thesis did not change. In Essay on the Principle of Population,Malthus proposes the principle that human populations grow exponentially (i.e., doubling with each cycle) while food production grows at an arithmetic rate (i.e. by the repeated addition of a uniform increment in each uniform interval of time). He saw positive checks to population growth as being any causes that contributed to the shortening of human lifespans. Back to main menu return to top | previous page | next page
New words — and what they say about us Maybe two years ago, my sister and I came up with what we thought was a genius term for a photo that someone snapped of themselves on their cameraphone: an “extended arm shot.” Someone else, however, came up with a term that rolled far more easily off the tongue: the “selfie.” The rest is history. Who hasn’t, at some point in time, either made up a word or repeated one they heard dreamed up by someone else? In her TED Talk, Anne Curzan — an English language historian — takes a look at new words like “hangry” and “adorkable,” and shows how colloquial terms like these get sealed in dictionaries. And while some lament these types of words as the death of a language, Curzan says they reveal that a language is living, breathing, and growing. As a member of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, she certainly knows what she’s talking about. Below, take a look at the nominated words from just the past four years. 2012 Word of the Year: hashtag. Photo: iStock.