Clipmarks | balthazarus's clips

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

Monkey see, monkey do...

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:48:48 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: "These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.

De Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society's moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals."
Natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people, he writes in "Primates and Philosophers," with "a compass for life's choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality."

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Biologist sees human morality evolving from the sociality of primates

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Tags: biology, morality, society

Theory and actuation

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:18:37 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: I find it as a nice example of the need always to look for ways to test one theory of...
Only then will clarity arise above the unmediated unchallenged and largely unsupported knowledge one has about the world and herself.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Calculating Consumer Happiness at Any Price

Old-fashioned cost-conscious consumers would react to a price increase by lowering demand for the product, but we sometimes do just the opposite. We want to buy more of it because we assume it must be a better product — and we’re so thoroughly fooled that our bodies even respond differently to it.

wine they’re tasting costs $90 a bottle, then the reward centers of their brains will light up more than if you tell them it’s a $10 bottle.

But suppose, instead of scanning people’s brains as they’re sipping wine in a laboratory, you tested them in a more realistic situation: a restaurant where they’re spending their own money

But after three months of testing various combinations of prices, the researchers found they couldn’t sway the customers. Putting a higher price on the shrimp or any other entree didn’t make people more likely to order it.

knowing that ‘A has a positive effect on B’ is not enough. The effect may simply be too small to matter

Tags: tests, theory, experiment

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

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

A game for life

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 09:05:39 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: "The challenge is to learn enough about the brain changes induced by different technologies and types of games in order to be able to guide them, enhancing functions that result in a functional and behavioral advantage for each individual. If done properly, the motivating, almost addictive, nature of these technologies, may actually prove a very valuable ally to achieve desired goals in education, medical treatment, and rehabilitation."
I do agree to the point that it is up to us, humans, to pour the meaning into the availability that is technology.

Clip Source: www.scientificamerican.com

Take two video games and call me in the morning

What is all this video gaming doing to young brains?

Growing scientific evidence demonstrates that the human brain dynamically changes in response to experience and to changes in the environment, a phenomenon that is known as “plasticity.”

a world with vastly different technology driven demands, opportunities and challenges, is surely going to lead to brain changes

video games may actually induce brain changes that lead to behavioral benefits.

number of applications of computer games have been developed for education and rehabilitation

A recent study by Daphne Bavelier and colleagues at the University of Rochester offers the intriguing suggestion that playing video games may not only be beneficial because of practicing specific skills, but may also enhance core functions of vision – something that has been classically viewed as immutable as an adult.

game induce different brain changes and thus promote different behavioral advantages

Tags: games, computer, brain, behaviour

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

Augmented Reality

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:15:43 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Some of the Apps sound great.

Clip Source: www.readwriteweb.com

Augmented Reality: Here's Our Wishlist of Apps, What's On Yours?

Augmented Reality

AR) is the phrase being used and this practice of making layers of data available on top of real world experiences could be a big one soon

our wish list for Augmented Reality apps

Place Data

mobile app called Layar that will display real estate and restaurant information on top of the view through your phone's camera as you pan around a city

Clip Source: layar.eu

Clip Source: www.readwriteweb.com

We would love to be able stand at an intersection and learn about the past and present owners of the buildings around us and about news events that have occurred within sight (Outside.in's iPhone app does this

Find My Keys or Car

How about an app that lets you capture and remember the location of your keys, car, or anything else you might have trouble finding later

Face Recognition and People Search

How about being able to bring up all a persons' public social media profile links just by looking at them through your mobile phone's camera?

Tags: reality, technology

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

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

Fallen Princesses

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:48:55 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: www.jpgmag.com

Fallen Princesses

These works place Fairy Tale characters in modern day scenarios. In all of the images the Princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict. The '...happily ever after' is replaced with a realistic outcome and addresses current issues.

The Disney versions almost always have sad beginning, with an overbearing female villain, and the end is predictably a happy one. The Prince usually saves the day and makes the victimized young beauty into a Princess

the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney.

imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues

Clip Source: www.jpgmag.com

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

Clipmarks | balthazarus's clips

Understanding does not diminish Awe

Monkey see, monkey do...

Biologist sees human morality evolving from the sociality of primates

Theory and actuation

Head Scarf Emerges as Indonesia Political Symbol

A Moved Mover

A game for life

Take two video games and call me in the morning

Mind-Controlled Wheelchair

Toyota Develops Mind-Controlled Wheelchair

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality: Here's Our Wishlist of Apps, What's On Yours?

Place Data

Find My Keys or Car

Face Recognition and People Search

The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content

Dreaming of Nonsense: The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content

Atlas Obscura

About the Atlas Obscura

Museum of Bad Art

Torre Argentina - Roman Cat Sanctuary

Fallen Princesses

Fallen Princesses

Belle

Cinder 3

Snowy

Rapunzel II

Not so Little Riding Hood

Jasmine at war

Sleeping Beauty

What is a fair price for free knowledge?

Finding a fair price for free knowledge

Robots with a taste for flesh..

Girl that doesn’t age

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

'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moon

'Misty caverns' on Enceladus moon

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

No sodium in the vapour plumes of Enceladus