Clipmarks | balthazarus's clips

Head Scarf Emerges as Indonesia Political Symbol

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:25:21 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Golkar Party officials rejected accusations by the president’s party that they were trying to exploit Islam for politics; they also denied having anything to do with the recent distribution of leaflets that stated, falsely, that Boediono’s wife was not Muslim, but Roman Catholic.
The fundamentalists are trying to force women to wear the jilbab as an act of submission, and had already done so in various municipalities across the Indonesian archipelago in recent years, Ms. Neng said. For the progressives, she said, wearing the jilbab was an expression of a woman’s right.

“For women in Indonesia, whether they want to wear the jilbab or not is their choice,” said Ms. Neng, who started wearing one five years ago. “It shouldn’t be political.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Head Scarf Emerges as Indonesia Political Symbol

JAKARTA, Indonesia — The three parties competing in Indonesia’s presidential election next week have plastered this city with campaign billboards and posters depicting, predictably, their presidential and vice presidential choices looking self-confident.

But one party, Golkar, has also put up posters of the candidates’ wives next to their husbands, posing demurely and wearing Muslim head scarves known here as jilbabs. The wives recently went on a jilbab shopping spree in one of Jakarta’s largest markets, and published a book together titled “Devout Wives of Future Leaders.”

Most polls suggest that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of the Democratic Party will be re-elected

after running a smooth campaign based on his economic policies and a popular anticorruption drive. Despite television debates, the personality-driven campaigns have focused little on differences over policies or ideas, except regarding the wearing of the jilbab

Tags: politics, religion, women

Understanding does not diminish Awe

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:52:50 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: "The religious experience is, at best, a stunted variety of this feeling. Awe without understanding, or at least the desire for understanding, degenerates into mysticism: viewing a mystery not as a challenge to be solved, but something to be worshipped for its own sake. Mysticism states that ignorance is a desirable condition, a state we should glory in. This attitude only keeps us frightened and ignorant, and worst of all, robs us of the deeper and more genuine awe that comes with comprehension. I say, let us explore. There may be problems too high or too deep for us, mysteries we cannot penetrate - but so far, we haven't found any, and if there are any, they will not need to be protected from our investigations."

Clip Source: www.daylightatheism.org

Moving Beyond Awe

The nineteenth-century German theologian Rudolf Otto, in his book The Idea of the Holy, popularized the term "numinous", an adjective describing the sense of mystery and wonder that purportedly stems from the presence of a deity. According to Otto, the sense of the numinous had two main characteristics: the mysterium tremendum, the sense of fear and trembling that comes from the presence of that which is wholly other, and the mysterium fascinas, the sense of fascination and curiosity that such an experience evokes.

Otto's theology concisely sums up the categories of religious experience. But the problem with his conception of the numinous is that it lacks one very important quality - understanding.

For Otto, as for many theists, the numinous is not something we should seek to comprehend.

there is no mention of penetrating the mystery

pulling back the curtain of our ignorance

what humanity has been doing throughout its history: piercing the mysteries that surround us

Tags: atheism, religion, understanding, awe

A Moved Mover

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:38:09 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: An interesting account that names and refute all arguments favoring a godly existence of any sort.
...
As David Hume wrote over 200 years ago in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,
"What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought,
that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe?"

Clip Source: www.ebonmusings.org

Unmoved Mover

God is not a being that exists by mere definition (as the ontological argument unsuccessfully tries to establish); nor is God a mere mental state, with no existence independent of people's minds (at least, not according to most theists); nor is God's existence a necessary proposition to make sense of the world (as the presuppositional argument tries and fails to claim). Therefore, we can safely conclude that God's existence is not a properly basic belief, but rather an empirical proposition about the external world; it can only be properly supported by evidence, not mere assertion

it may surprise them to learn that all the most commonly heard arguments for God's existence have been around in one form or another literally for centuries

all of them were refuted soon after they were first proposed

The Ontological Argument

The Cosmological Argument

The Design Argument

The Moral Argument

The Presuppositional Argument

Other Arguments

Tags: atheism

Mind-Controlled Wheelchair

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:41:55 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Impressive.
Another example to the ever increasing in availability that technology enables.

Clip Source: www.informationweek.com

Toyota Develops Mind-Controlled Wheelchair

researchers in Japan have built a brain/machine interface (BMI) that has been demonstrated to control a wheelchair using a person's thoughts

The system enables a person to make a wheelchair turn left or right to move forward simply by thinking the commands. The response time is in 125 milliseconds

The BTCC's system uses several sensors placed over the areas of the brain that control motion to measure electrical activity in the region. The electical impulses triggered by the rider thinking of turning or moving the wheelchair are picked up and analyzed by an onboard laptop that passes the commands on to the wheelchair.

The system has an emergency stop that can be activated by the user puffing his cheeks.

The BMI adjusts itself over time to the characteristics of each driver's brainwaves. If a person dedicates three hours a day to using the system, the BMI can reach 95% accuracy in a week, researchers said.

to be applied to other types of brain waves

Tags: technology, brain, computer

Atlas Obscura

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:44:29 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: atlasobscura.com

About the Atlas Obscura

Welcome to the Atlas Obscura, a compendium of this age's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica. The Atlas Obscura is a collaborative project with the goal of cataloging all of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. If you're looking for miniature cities, glass flowers, books bound in human skin, gigantic flaming holes in the ground, phallological museums, bone churches, balancing pagodas, or homes built entirely out of paper, the Atlas Obscura is where you'll find them.

The Atlas Obscura depends on our community of far-flung explorers

Anyone and everyone is welcome and encouraged to nominate places for inclusion, and to edit content already in the Atlas

Clip Source: atlasobscura.com

Carnivorous plants, medieval aphrodisiacs, and the largest original wood structure glass conservatory in the western hemisphere

Museum of Bad Art

Torre Argentina - Roman Cat Sanctuary

Tags: travel, community

The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:11:08 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: A question which is more interesting then the possible answers...
that is an advantage

Clip Source: www.scientificamerican.com

Dreaming of Nonsense: The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content

it’s relatively easy to see why sleep itself would have conferred evolutionary advantages (avoiding nocturnal predators, recharging our neural batteries and so on), it’s not entirely clear why we don’t simply sleep without dreaming.

Barrett shrugs off the better-known psychoanalytic theories of dreams

highlights the major contemporary, biologically informed theories

Brain Conditioning

stimulate the brain or to keep it “in shape” during prolonged periods of inactivity

replenish neurotransmitters

rest a particular brain area

Steven Pinker writes, “For all we know, dreaming might be a kind of screen saver in which it doesn’t really matter what the content is as long as certain parts of the brain are active.”

External Vigilance

Threat Simulation Theory

allowed our ancestors to simulate problem-solving strategies for genuine, waking life threats

Costly Signaling Theory

Dreaming as Problem-Solving

Clip Source: www.scientificamerican.com

notable figures

insights through dreams

Tags: dream, evolution

What is a fair price for free knowledge?

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:59:02 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: "When it comes to knowledge, you can never have too much of a good thing."

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Finding a fair price for free knowledge

TEN years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it, but will our legal and economic system ever allow it?

The irony of the battle between advocates of abundance and advocates of scarcity is that both sides are right. It makes no sense to limit and control access now we have technologies to give information to everyone. But it is also foolish to pretend we do not need incentives to help produce and publish that information.

build institutions that promote knowledge-sharing

while at the same time ensuring that there are incentives for creative and technical minds to contribute

Tags: internet, knowledge, open source

Robots with a taste for flesh..

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:06:45 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Domestic robots with a taste for flesh

Believing that they need to fit unobtrusively into the home, he has built robotic furniture.

need to be useful and entertaining, he has given the furniture an appetite for vermin, like mice and flies

Each can sense its environment, has mechanical moving parts, and can perform basic services for its human hosts, such as telling the time or lighting a room.

They can gain energy by chomping on flies and mice

The pests are lured in and digested by an internal microbial fuel cell. This exploits the way microbes generate free electrons and hydrogen ions when oxidising chemicals for energy. Electronics can be powered by directing the electrons around an external circuit before reuniting them with the ions.

Although, for now, the robots rely on mains power, Auger believes they could become truly self-sufficient

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Coffee table robot

This is a coffee table that doubles as a mouse trap.

Crumbs are placed on the table to encourage mice to climb up

sensors open the door

Tags: robotics, energy

Girl that doesn’t age

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:29:21 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Strange indeed...

Clip Source: www.zmescience.com

Girl that doesn’t age baffles scientists: a 16 year old is an infant

Physiologically speaking, Brooke Greenberg is an infant with the mind of toddler. Only thing is that she turned 16 just this Janary. It’s hard to estimate the parents opinion, especially as I wasn’t able to find almost any constructive data.

“Many of the best-known names in medicine, in their experience … had not seen anyone who matched up to Brooke,” Pakula said. “She is always a surprise.”

She is not aging, but it seems that her body is developing as independent parts out of sync. If you were to look at photos, she is unchanged, and there’s no indication that she would be in fact getting any older, and as far as everybody knows, if this continues on, she has no reason to die. She also has a sister, but she’s perfectly normal, so there aren’t any hints here to help solve this mystery.

“Why doesn’t she age?” Howard Greenberg, 52, asked of his daughter. “Is she the fountain of youth?”

named her condition ’syndrome X’

Tags: biology, mystery

'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moon

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:11:41 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Opposing opinions regarding the water vapors coming from Enceladus.

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moon

Nasa's Cassini spacecraft has obtained strong evidence that Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus retains liquid water.

Liquid water that is in prolonged contact with rock will leach out sodium - in exactly the same way as Earth's oceans have become salty over time.

Scientists tell Nature magazine that the liquid water may reside in caverns just below the surface of the moon.

Clip Source: www.nature.com

Sodium salts in E-ring ice grains from an ocean below the surface of Enceladus

Saturn's moon Enceladus emits plumes of water vapour and ice particles from fractures near its south pole

rich in sodium salts

which can arise only if the plumes originate from liquid water

Clip Source: www.nature.com

No sodium in the vapour plumes of Enceladus

The discovery of water vapour and ice particles erupting from Saturn's moon Enceladus fuelled speculation that an internal ocean was the source

argues against a situation in which a near-surface geyser is fuelled by a salty ocean through cracks in the crust

data may be insufficient

Tags: space

Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world?

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:59:21 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: An interesting account, exposing some of the background which composes perception..

Clip Source: www.edge.org

linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

Does learning new languages change the way you think?

Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind

very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently

What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.

Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human

Appreciating its role

brings us one step closer to understanding

Tags: language, universe, perception

Faking brands is as old as human civilization

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:40:39 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks:

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

1,000 years on, perils of fake Viking swords are revealed

It must have been an appalling moment when a Viking realised he had paid two cows for a fake designer sword; a clash of blade on blade in battle would have led to his sword, still sharp enough to slice through bone, shattering like glass.

Some Viking swords were among the best ever made, still fearsome weapons after a millennium

bear the maker's name, Ulfberht, in raised letters at the hilt end

Puzzlingly, so do the worst ones, found in fragments on battle sites or in graves

The Vikings would have found it impossible to tell the difference

The difference would have only emerged in use, often fatally

the genuine ones were made from ingots of crucible steel, which the Vikings brought back from furnaces thousands of miles away in modern Afghanistan and Iran

the inferior swords were forged in northern Europe from locally worked iron

genuine Ulfberht swords had a phenomenally high carbon content

11th century the Russians blocked the trade

Tags: history, archaeology

Brain could adapt well to cyborg enhancements

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:58:54 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Farné says the same kind of brain "plasticity" might be involved in regaining control of a transplanted hand or a prosthetic limb when the original has been lost. The brain might also readily incorporate cyborg additions – a cyborg arm or other body part – into its body schema, says Farné, "and possibly new body parts differing in shape and/or number, for example four arms."

Small implants such as pacemakers are inserted in the existing body so do not need to be accepted by the body schema, adds Farné, "but a pair of wings would – that would be tough!"

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Brain could adapt well to cyborg enhancements

When you brush your teeth, the toothbrush may actually become part of your arm – at least as far as your brain is concerned. That's the conclusion of a study showing perceptions of arm length change after people handle a mechanical tool.

The brain maintains a physical map of the body, with different areas in charge of different body parts. Researchers have suggested that when we use tools, our brains incorporate them into this map.

attached a mechanical grabber to the arms of 14 volunteers. The modified subjects then used the grabber to pick up out-of-reach objects.

Shortly afterwards, the volunteers perceived touches on their elbow and fingertip as further apart than they really were, and took longer to point to or grasp objects with their hand than prior to using the tool.

their brains had adjusted the brain areas that normally control the arm to account for the tool and not yet adjusted back to normal.

Tags: brain, cyborg, neuroscience

Free Will or better yet free the will...

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:30:31 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Interesting talk.

Clip Source: www.edge.org

THE SIMPLIFIER
A Conversation with John A. Bargh

"They say that in science there are complicators and there are simplifiers," says John Bargh, Yale social psychologist known for his early work on the topic of automaticity, and more recently for bringing experimental methodology to the philosophical question of free will.

people were, essentially, mindless a lot of the time in their social interactions

maybe all this conscious reasoning is not so necessary to produce complex higher mental processes and sophisticated behavior in adults.

All organisms are purposive and have reasons for what they do. We certainly have that of course. So it's not that will doesn't exist; it's that the free part is problematic — a lot of people see free will and say, "Well, you're showing there's no free will; therefore, people have no intentions or will." No.

There is will, and will can be shaped by a host of factors

A lot of recent research on unconscious effects is showing that it's culture

Tags: philosophy, psychology

New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:58:09 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Interesting article. It exposes some of the human's desire to overreach the limitations of its knowledge.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins

Some 3.9 billion years ago, a shift in the orbit of the Sun’s outer planets sent a surge of large comets and asteroids careening into the inner solar system. Their violent impacts gouged out the large craters still visible on the Moon’s face, heated Earth’s surface into molten rock and boiled off its oceans into an incandescent mist.

Yet rocks that formed on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, almost as soon as the bombardment had stopped, contain possible evidence of biological processes. If life can arise from inorganic matter so quickly and easily, why is it not abundant in the solar system and beyond? If biology is an inherent property of matter, why have chemists so far been unable to reconstruct life, or anything close to it, in the laboratory?

The origins of life on Earth bristle with puzzle and paradox

Which came first

In the last few years, however, four surprising advances have renewed confidence

explanation for life’s origins will

emerge

Tags: life