Clipmarks | abailart's clips

Some Precepts of Engaged Buddhism

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:38:36 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones.

Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others' viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.

help others renounce fanaticism and narrow-mindedness.

Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry.

Do not spread news that you do not know to be certain. Do not criticize or condemn things of which you are not sure.

Do not kill. Do not let others kill.

Respect the property of others, but prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth.

From the book 'Interbeing': Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism, revised edition: Oct. l993 by Thich Nhat Hanh

Tags: thich nhat hanh, engaged buddhism

Mediocrity

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:03:25 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: quote.robertgenn.com

Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from. (Jodie Foster)

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. (Paul Gauguin)

"Mediocrity" doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters. (Ayn Rand)

Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating. (Tom Robbins)

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding. (Francois de La Rochefoucauld)

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike. (Margot Fonteyn)

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. (Albert Camus)

Tags: mediocrity

Is Intelligence Sexy?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:22:39 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: <<<Many traits in many species have evolved through sexual selection specifically to function as fitness indicators that reveal good genes and good health. Sexually selected fitness indicators typically show (1) higher coefficients of phenotypic and genetic variation than survival traits, (2) at least moderate genetic heritabilities and (3) positive correlations with many aspects of an animal's general condition, including body size, body symmetry, parasite resistance, longevity and freedom from deleterious mutations. These diagnostic criteria also appear to describe human intelligence (the g factor).>>> (from abstract).

So then, is there some sort of mirror neuron circuitry in the brain that excites a cortical g spot?

Clip Source: www3.interscience.wiley.com

during human evolution, mate choice by both sexes focused increasingly on intelligence as a major heritable component of biological fitness. Many human-specific behaviours (such as conversation, music production, artistic ability and humour) may have evolved principally to advertise intelligence during courtship. Though these mental adaptations may be modular at the level of psychological functioning, their efficiencies may be tightly intercorrelated because they still tap into common genetic and neurophysiological variables associated with fitness itself. Although the g factor (like the superordinate factor of fitness itself) probably exists in all animal species, humans evolved an unusually high degree of interest in assessing each other's intelligence during courtship and other social interactions

Tags: g factor, sex

Wooly Thinker's Guide to Rhetoric

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 09:06:20 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: or How to Be a Woolyback and Convince Yourself and Others that You are Rational

Clip Source: www.butterfliesandwheels.com

Here you'll find top tips for besting your enemies. As employed by the world's best woolly-thinkers. Learn, for example: how to play the 'biological reductionist' card to maximum effect; how 'language games' can help you out of a sticky situation; and how lucky it is that 'truth' is relative to particular discourses (especially yours).

Tags: rhetoric, thinking ineptitude

Life Beyond Google: Eight Great Alternative Search Engines

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:24:22 GMT

clipped by: anpl32

Clip Source: webworkerdaily.com

Everyzing is one of my favorite sites for searching for audio- and video-based information found on the web. It actually indexes the words spoken in podcasts and videocasts, and then it displays excerpts as text

SearchEngineColossus is great for doing targeted searches in any language using the actual engine that locals use.

Answers.com. Answers.com lets you type in a question and then sifts through your search results to find the answer to your question.

SearchGov is a great way to search for government institutions and offices, and divisions within them.

If you remember a string of text from a book, you can often find it in context at SearcheBooks.

IncyWincy crawls the Invisible Web. It’s especially good at executing searches within targeted search engines on the web and letting you know exactly which rock it’s finding promising results under

FindArticles. The site houses over 10 million articles

Tags: web search, search engines

The Reassurance of Magic

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:32:43 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: A very straightforward polemic to chew over between the cornflakes and the coffee. (Certainly, almost anything is better than pop science).

Clip Source: newhumanist.org.uk

It could well be that religion is a better discipline than pop science, when it comes to shaping the rational intellect

Beliefs which fill the existential void are not scientific beliefs. We don’t arrive at them by the hypothetico-deductive method, or by observation of the empirical world. They are matters of faith – that is to say, of certainties that cannot be grounded by anything more certain than themselves. But these foundational beliefs perform their reassuring function only if they carry with them a message of love.

It is, to my way of thinking, a paradox of the new humanism, that it looks on human beings through the lens of evolution, but refuses to accept what evolution tells us. The need for foundations is quite clearly an adaptation, and these foundations must provide the promise of protection and love, if they are to fit the new organism for its brief time in the world.

Tags: knee-jerk reactions, thinking with the spinal cord, individuation, thinking skills

Free Lectures and Courses...

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:48:27 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: This was clipped some time ago by someone to whom I add thanks. Newer clippers may find it interesting. I've detailed the astronomy items as that is what I was searching for.

Clip Source: www.openculture.com

Free Lectures & Courses from Great Universities (Audio and Video)

Astronomy

Astrobiology and Space Exploration – iTunes – Lynn Rotschild, Stanford

Astronomy 101 – iTunes – Web Site – Scott Miller, Mercedes Richards & Stephen Redman, Penn State

Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics - Download Course – Charles Bailyn, Yale

Introduction to General Astronomy – iTunes – Feed – Alex Filippenko, UC Berkeley

Humanities & Social Sciences

Archaeology

Architecture

Art History

Cultural Studies

Economics

Geography

History

Literature

Philosophy

Political Science, International Relations and Law

Religion

Sociology

Urban Studies

Sciences Aeronautics

Biology

Chemistry

Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence

Earth Sciences

Engineering (Mechanical, Civil and Electrical)

Geology

Information Sciences

Mathematics

Natural Resources

Physics

Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

Business

General Open Course Collections

The best free cultural & educational media on the web

Tags: university lectures and courses

Mind-Reading Technology Development

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 08:04:53 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Primitive, but intriguing. Maybe if we survive 2012 we will just plug our brains into the computer and bypass the keyboard. I have suspected for some time that some clippers are ghostly autopoetic entities emerging from the mesh of internet complexity.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak into words after a pioneering experiment.

Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been "locked in" - conscious but paralysed - since a car crash eight years ago.

These have been recording pulses in the areas of the brain involved in speech.

Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to create speech software.

Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay's brain is imagining some 80% of the time

In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.

"It's very exciting that we are starting to be able to translate some basic thoughts, but we are lot further away from a universal mind reading machine than some people hoped - or feared - we may be five years ago."

Tags: mind-reading, cognitive technology

Ratzinger on his way to UK

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:06:47 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Save us, O Lord, save us all. Save us from the Pope. Joseph Ratzinger is coming to Britain. Gordon Brown is "delighted". David Cameron is "delighted". I am "repelled". Let him come; I applaud freedom of speech. But no red carpets, please. No biscuits. No Queen.

Ratzinger's job to investigate the child abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic church for decades

investigations should be handled "in the most secretive way . . . restrained by a perpetual silence"

Aids, Ratzinger says, "cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems". That is a lie. Not a fantasy, like the virgin birth and all the other magical, mystical nonsense, but a dangerous lie.

homosexuality is "an intrinsic moral evil".

sees the push for female priests as driven by "spokeswomen for radical feminists, especially lesbians".

suppression of Liberation Theology, a Latin American movement that insists that social justice is the central purpose of Christianity

Tags: ratzinger

Dark Mountain

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:19:17 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.dark-mountain.net

These are precarious and unprecedented times. Our economies crumble, while beyond the chaos of markets, the ecological foundations of our way of living near collapse. Little that we have taken for granted is likely to come through this century intact.

As a society, we are all still hooked on a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. Somehow, technology or political agreements or ethical shopping or mass protest are meant to save our civilisation from self-destruction.

Deeper than oil, steel or bullets, a civilisation is built on stories: on the myths that shape it and the tales told of its origins and destiny. We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of ‘progress’, of the conquest of ‘nature’, of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.

It is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain Project intends to conjure into being new ways of seeing and writing about the world.

Tags: dark mountain project

Metaphors We Live By

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:54:42 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: A short step whence to seeing all language as metaphor and metaphor as the meeting of the body and consciousness. Hard to stomach for right-angled rationalists, those who carry tablets of stone truths, number crunchers and those who live in a bricked-up mind. Spot the metaphors.

Clip Source: www.boston.com

When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it.

whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing--out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world.

Friends in high places

"The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought,”

the human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning

Tags: lakoff and johnson, metaphor, embodied mind

Defenders of Christianity

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:31:18 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Thank goodness it was all so long ago.

Clip Source: wapedia.mobi

'We shall not tolerate in our ranks anyone who hurts Christian ideas.'

Hitler

The Oxford Group was a Christian movement that had a following in Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s. It was initiated by an American Lutheran pastor Dr. Frank Buchman,

Buchman referred to Himmler as "a great lad"

'He lets us have house-parties whenever we like.' He did not seem to think much of England or of Canada: England was in a terrible state — 'seething with Communism'; and so was Canada.

I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism,

Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.

The world needs the dictatorship of the living spirit of God.

Human problems aren't economic. They're moral and they can't be solved by immoral measures.

they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.

Tags: oxford group, national socialism

Why all cities are haunted

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:24:58 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: megalopolisomancy...

Clip Source: io9.com

Megalopolisomancy, Or Why All Cities Are Haunted

Your city seethes with ghosts. Its impossibly twisted streets stream with magic, and its chimneys exude smoke of a decidedly hallucinatory nature. Why do modern, urban places feel as if they are home to so many unexplainable, otherworldly forces?

History and the Unknowable

Why are vampires' mythical, bloodstained faces hidden in trashed alleyway shadows in your city? Because most cities aren't just packed with people. They are layered with history - sometimes many thousands of years of it. Even in relatively new cities like San Francisco or Toronto, several dead generations have walked the streets before you. They've lived in your houses, and gone to your favorite shops.

Like vampires, these unknowable phantoms of history are hidden. But their influence lingers in the present. When you go into the buildings they built, buy their used clothing at the Goodwill, and eat in the dining rooms where they once did, you brush shoulders with the dead.

Tags: fritz lieber, "our lady of darkness", megalopolisomancy-the magic of big cities, novels