Space Zen: Will Humans Brains Change During Travel in Outer Space? -A Galaxy Insight. In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeing of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him.
He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing.
Newberg's first test subject will not be an astronaut, but rather a civilian. This is done with Faraday cages. Why Monetary Expansion Must Stop - Patrick Barron. [Address delivered at the European Parliament in Brussels on March 16, 2011] Introduction: The Illusion of Unlimited Resources The current problems faced by all the world's economies stem, primarily, from one source: the demise of sound money, whose quantity could not be increased without significant cost, and its replacement with fiat money that can be inflated to infinite amounts at almost no cost to the producer. Expansion of fiat money makes it appear to all market participants, including financial regulators, that there are more resources available than really exist. Thusly, all participants, including governments, embark on programs that cannot be completed; there just are not enough resources in the economy. Not only does fiat money create the illusion of greater wealth, it makes embarking on new projects irresistible.
Throughout my talk I will refer to economic laws that act as impenetrable barriers to achieving the goals sought by monetary expansion. Coercion Is No Solution. 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. "We quite suddenly realized that we were looking at a general pattern": Q&A with Richard Wilkinson. In 2009, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett published the book The Spirit Level, making a bold case that economic inequality within a society, the size of the gap between rich and poor, has corrosive effects from the bottom of society right up to the top. Wilkinson spoke about their book and research this summer at TEDGlobal (watch his TEDTalk); earlier this week, he talked to the TED Blog about how he and Pickett came to this insight … and what Occupy Wall Street might mean for the future of fairness.
When did your research start heading in this direction? What made you look at broad inequality within societies? I’ve been involved in research on health inequalities — the huge social class differences in death rates — for more than 30 years. And the work I talked about at TED really came out of that. I worked on that for quite a long time, before discovering that criminologists had shown that violence was also more common in more unequal societies. In a way it’s obvious. Story of Broke & The Story of Stuff Project. The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working.
But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke, released on November 8, 2011, calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs and a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better. Credits Show full list of credits. Rats Free Trapped Friends, Hint at Universal Empathy.
With a few liberating swipes of their paws, a group of research rats freed trapped labmates and raised anew the possibility that empathy isn’t unique to humans and a few extra-smart animals, but is widespread in the animal world. Though more studies are needed on the rats’ motivations, it’s at least plausible they demonstrated “empathically motivated pro-social behavior.” People would generally call that helpfulness, or even kindness. “Rats help other rats in distress. That means it’s a biological inheritance,” said neurobiologist Peggy Mason of the University of Chicago.
In a study published Dec. 7 in Science, Mason and University of Chicago psychologists Jean Decety and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal describe their rat empathy-testing apparatus: An enclosure into which pairs of rats were placed, with one roaming free and the other restrained inside a plastic tube. Still, it was hard to know what to think, and emotional contagion didn’t equal empathy. Michio Kaku on The Singularity.
Eight Must-Have Charts Summarize the Evidence for a "Human Fingerprint" on Recent Climate Change. By Joe Romm on October 6, 2011 at 4:05 pm "Eight Must-Have Charts Summarize the Evidence for a “Human Fingerprint” on Recent Climate Change" Click to Enlarge The Yale Project on Climate Change Communications asked Americans “If you had the opportunity to talk to an expert on global warming, which of the following questions would you like to ask?” The top question, as reported in their “Global Warming’s Six Americas in May 2011” report, is “How do you know that global warming is caused mostly by human activities, not natural changes in the environment?”
So this is a question that all climate hawks should be able to answer, and the figures/charts in this post are ones that you can refer to. Given the popularity of my recent “Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts,” which collected and summarized dozens of posts covering some 50 scientific articles, I thought I would occasionally repost updated versions of other important pieces and reviews. Here are key fingerprint figures:
Better live in Sweden than in the US: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better | Nicolas Blog. Details Category: Nicolas' Blog Published on Thursday, 11 February 2010 23:00 Written by Nicolas Baumard Let's talk about politics for once. First, the evidence: There is a strong correlation between inequality and health and social problems. Income inequality is measured by the ratio of incomes among the richest compared with the poorest 20% in each country. In contrast, there is no relationship between income and health and social problems. The same phenomenon is visible across the 50 US states: Note that is consistent with the fact that over 10 000$ per person, more money do not improve people' situation. This global relationship between inequality and social problems is true for each component in particular, such as child well-being: The Unicef index measured six different aspects of child well-being.
Mental health: Or obesity: It may seem obvious that problems associated with relative deprivation should be more common in more unequal societies. Compare for instance England and Sweden: Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1984), pp. 1007-1026. If You Believe in IP, How Do You Teach Others? - Jeffrey A. Tucker. Some Harvard professors are taking very seriously their "intellectual property rights" and have claimed copyright to the ideas that they spread in their classrooms.
What prompted this was a website in which students posted their notes to help other students. The professors have cracked down. It might have been enough to legislate against this behavior in particular. Instead, they wrapped their objection in the great fallacy of our age: the professor owns his ideas and they may not be spread without his permission. This action has opened up a can of worms, and now other universities have taken up the puzzling question: how do you at once enforce intellectual property and uphold the ideal of a university, which is, after all, about teaching and spreading ideas to others?
There are two possible ways out of this problem in a digital age: open source or IP. My lectures are protected by state common law and federal copyright law. You can make "no other use" of what you learn? I WANT TO LOSE A FORTUNE. History of Work Ethic. Home Page Historical Context of the Work Ethic Roger B. Hill, Ph.D. From a historical perspective, the cultural norm placing a positive moral value on doing a good job because work has intrinsic value for its own sake was a relatively recent development (Lipset, 1990). Work, for much of the ancient history of the human race, has been hard and degrading. Previous Section Attitudes Toward Work During the Classical Period One of the significant influences on the culture of the western world has been the Judeo-Christian belief system.
Traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs state that sometime after the dawn of creation, man was placed in the Garden of Eden "to work it and take care of it" (NIV, 1973, Genesis 2:15). The Greeks, like the Hebrews, also regarded work as a curse (Maywood, 1982). Mental labor was also considered to be work and was denounced by the Greeks. Previous Section Attitudes Toward Work During the Medieval Period Previous Section Protestantism and the Protestant Ethic. America's Unique Fascism - Anthony Gregory. "The dirty little secret is that there has been a bipartisan project of corporatism, the economic underpinning of fascism, for almost a century. " Five years ago, antiwar liberals calling the Bush administration fascist were labeled as kooks, marginalized by their own party leadership, accused by conservatives of treasonous thoughts worthy of federal punishment, even deportation.
A few years pass, the policies hardly change, and the political dynamic turns upside down: tea-party conservatives accusing the Obama regime of fascist impulses are compared to terrorists, accused of being racists, told that their hyperbole is a real threat to the country's security. The establishment derides both groups for their fringe outlook on America, convinced that the United States is anything but a fascist country. After all, isn't America the nation that defeated fascism in the 1940s? Sensible conservatives and liberals agree with that. The FDR-Bush Program of Economic Corporatism Warmongering Nationalism.