Clipmarks | ouyangwulong's Learning collection

Eternalism, Nihilism: new forms, old superstition

Tue, 06 May 2008 09:47:03 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: <<<Throughout the Buddha's long period of teaching the Dhamma to His followers, He actively discouraged speculative arguments. During the 5th century B.C. India was a veritable hive of intellectual activity where scholars, yogis, philosophers, kings and even ordinary householders were constantly engaged in the philosophical arguments pertaining to human existence. Some of these were either ridiculously trivial or totally irrelevant. Some people wasted valuable time arguing at great length about all manner of subjects. They were far more concerned about proving their powers in mental gymnastics than seeking genuine solutions to the problems that beset humanity.>>>

Clip Source: zencomp.com

To develop Right View or Perfect View, we must first be aware of two views which are considered imperfect or wrong.

The first view is eternalism. This doctrine or belief is concerned with eternal life or with eternal things. Before the Buddha's time, it was taught that there is an abiding entity which could exist forever, and that man can live the eternal life by preserving the eternal soul in order to be in union with Supreme Being. In Buddhism, this teaching is called sassata ditthi ----the view of eternalists. Such views still exist even in the modern world owing to man's craving for eternity.

The second false view is nihilism or the view held by the nihilists who claim that there is no life after death.

The teaching of kamma is enough to prove that the Buddha did not teach annihilation after death; Buddhism accepts 'survival' not in the sense of an eternal soul, but in the sense of a renewed becoming.

Tags: eternalism, nihilism, buddhism

840 CE: Trade between Viking Scandinavia and the Arab World

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:39:02 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: We take for granted that our world is more international today than it ever was before in history. Though our speed of trans-national communications, commerce and travel is truly staggering, ancient civilizations were not necessarily isolated islands.

Understanding that the Arabs and Vikings, Romans and Chinese were all part of a single international system, not monolithic bastions of "clashing" civilizations is the first step towards understanding how we can live peacefully with each other today.

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

Huge Viking Hoard Discovered in Sweden

Hundreds of ancient coins unearthed last week close to Sweden's main international airport suggests the Vikings were bringing home foreign currency earlier than previously thought, archaeologists say.

Buried some 1,150 years ago, the treasure trove is made up mainly of Arabic coins and represents the largest early Viking hoard ever discovered in Sweden.

"That coins were so important to the Vikings at such an early date is very interesting" and suggests they may have engaged in intensive overseas trade earlier than previously believed, he said.

Most of the coins were minted in Arab locations such as Baghdad in modern-day Iraq and Damascus in Syria. The youngest coin dates to the A.D. 840s

But the oldest coins came from Persia, said dig team member Karin Beckman-Thoor.

These Persian coins must have been in circulation for centuries before being buried and "were very high quality," she said.

Tags: arabs, vikings, coins, archeology, national geographic, clash of civilizations, international, globalism

Dinosaur Skin Mag: Hot chicks, skin totally preserved!

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:42:11 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: Fortunately, Paleontologist Theagarten Lingham-Soliar of the University of KwaZulu-Natal announced that the Psittacosaurus unearthed in Liaoning Province had intact, fossilized epidermis proving once and for all that the integumentary structure of Mesozoic Reptiles was in fact one of scales of hardened epithelial tissue, probably constructed from keratin (a) protiens, rather than feather like appendages constructed from keratin (b).

'Nuf said!

(Spell check that you bastards!)

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

The fossil is of a 130-million-year-old Psittacosaurus, or parrot lizard, a beaked reptile about the size of a pig that could walk on either two or four legs.

The research also suggests that some dinosaurs had thick, scaly skin like that of modern-day reptiles, refuting the theory that dinos had primitive feathers.

The findings were reported by Theagarten Lingham-Soliar of South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"To have soft tissue preserved is amazing in the fossil record, because clearly the soft tissue is about the first thing that will decay and disintegrate," Lingham-Soliar said.

"Until now we had seen only surface preservations, but this is the first time we see a deep cross-section of the skin cut away at right angles to the surface."

Tags: paleontology, theagarten lingham-soliar, university of kwazulu-natal, liaoning, epidermus, integumentary structure, mesozoic, epithelial, dinosaurs

Where the Heck do Fortune Cookies Come From? (In Bed)

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 10:47:53 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: Confucius say:

"Oh man, why don't you f***in' stop it? Sh**, this is too f***in' big for you, you know that? Who did the baking, who made the fortune cookie, f*** man! It's a mystery! It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma! The f***in' bakers don't even know! Don't you get it?"

(In Bed)

- David Farrie
Apoplectic Ethno-Culinary Conspiracy Theorist

Clip Source: www.iht.com

Solving a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a cookie

They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong

Tags: china, japan, fortune cookies, confucius say, in bed

Psychadelic Dim Sum! Chinese Breed Glowing Mutant Pigs

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:42:10 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: Actually, this is now my third clip about glowing animals, and to be perfectly honnest, I find the trend a little disturbing.

And, since the pigs are in Harbin, if I know Dongbeiren, they will probably now be eaten.

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

Glowing Pig Passes Genes to Piglets

A researcher holds two piglets under ultraviolet light to show the fluorescent green glow from their snouts, trotters, and tongues in Harbin, China, on Monday January 7, 2008.

The cloned mother pig's genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green, and this trait was passed on to 2 of her 11 offspring.

Scientists say the finding could lead to discoveries for human medicine.

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

Two of 11 piglets glow fluorescent green from their snouts, trotters, and tongues under ultraviolet light, according to Northeast Agricultural University, located in the city of Harbin.

The birth of the glowing piglets proves such transgenic pigs are fertile and able to pass on their engineered traits to their offspring, Liu said.

Tags: pigs, glowing, mutant, china, mad scientists, glowing animals, dim sum, harbin, dongbei ren

Wetland thrives beneath the Antarctic Ice

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 18:38:32 GMT

clipped by: ouyangwulong
clipper's remarks: This is actually an entire new world, possibly preserving ancient life. The complex system that has apparently existed unseen beneath the Antarctic ice sheet is another great example of truth being much more exciting than fiction.

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

Antarctica May Contain "Oasis of Life"

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

Antarctica is not a barren polar desert but a rich, complex environment that may contain a thriving "oasis of life," experts say.

Researchers have uncovered a complex subglacial system miles under the ice where rivers larger than the Amazon link a series of "lake districts," which may teem with mineral-hungry microbes.

This watery environment may be more than one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, scientists say, which would make it the world's largest wetland.

"This is essentially a whole new world that ten years ago we didn't know existed," said Michael Studinger, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University in New York.

The lakes—isolated from the atmosphere for more than 30 million years—ebb and flow as they empty into the polar sea. They stay fluid because the ice sheet above acts like a gigantic down blanket, trapping heat rising from Earth's interior.

Tags: antarctica, wetlands, science, discoveries, national geographic

Splat that pike! Disfigure that peacock! - words for early modern festive occasions

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:44:58 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman
clipper's remarks: Have you ever frusted a chicken?

Clip Source: roy25booth.blogspot.com

in cutting up therefore all manner of small Birds,

We say ‘thigh them’ as Wood-cocks, Pidgeons, Partridges, &c.

The term for a Plover, is, ‘Mince it’;

for a Quail, ‘wing it’;

for a Pheasant, ‘allay it’;

a Curlew, ‘attach it’;

a Bittern ‘unjoynt it’;

a Peacock, ‘disfigure it’;

a Crane, ‘display it’;

a Hern, ‘Dismember it’;

a Mallard, ‘unbrace it’;

a Chicken, ‘frust it’;

a Hen, ‘spoil her’;

a Capon, ‘Sawce it’;

a Swan, ‘chit it’;

a Goose, ‘tear her’;

a Coney, ‘unlace her’;

a Dear, ‘Creak it’;

Brawn, ‘leach it’;

and for Fish, viz. A Salmon, ‘chine it’;

a Lamprey, ‘string it’;

a Pike, ‘splat it’;

a Place or Tench, ‘sawce it’;

Bream, ‘splay it’;

a Haddock, ‘side it’;

a Barbel, ‘tusk it’;

a Trout, ‘culpon it’;

an Eel, ‘transon it’;

a Crab, ‘tame it’;

a Sturgeon, ‘Tranch it’;

and a Lobster, ‘barb it’.

Thus having the terms, we shall direct such as need it how to cut up some of these

a Swan, slit her right down in the middle of the breast, also through the back bone, from the Neck to the Rump

Why Are Pygmies Short?

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:19:49 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Because of their short life expectancies, the researchers speculate that pygmies have had to shift their reproductive years forward. The average life expectancy at birth for different pygmy populations ranges from just 16 years to 24 years. Very few pygmy women reach the end of their reproductive period, as only a small percentage survive past age 40.

Clip Source: physorg.com

The question is controversial. Traditional explanations attribute pygmies' small stature to minimizing caloric requirements and walking in dense forests. However, a new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge suggests that there are some problems with this explanation, and offers an alternative hypothesis.

Human pygmy populations are defined by an average male height of less than 5 feet (155 cm). By this definition, a wide range of pygmy societies exist today in parts of Africa, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, and Bolivia – different environments that don’t match the traditional hypotheses for small body size.

Besides the differences within pygmy populations, there are also some non-pygmy populations that face some of the same physical challenges as pygmies but haven’t evolved a short stature. For example, many human populations live in dense forests and experience regular food shortages, and yet these populations have larger body sizes.

Tags: pygmies, fertility, nutrition

Our Solar System formed 4568 million years ago

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 10:41:41 GMT

clipped by: Djiezes

Clip Source: www.news.ucdavis.edu

Earliest Stage of Planet Formation Dated

UC Davis researchers have dated the earliest step in the formation of the solar system -- when microscopic interstellar dust coalesced into mountain-sized chunks of rock -- to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years.

In the second stage, mountain-sized masses grew quickly into about 20 Mars-sized planets and, in the third and final stage, these small planets smashed into each other in a series of giant collisions that left the planets we know today. The dates of those stages are well established.

Tags: astronomy, science, solar system, space, sun

Traffic jam mystery solved by mathematicians

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 10:17:52 GMT

clipped by: Djiezes

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Traffic jam mystery solved by mathematicians

Mathematicians from the University of Exeter have solved the mystery of traffic jams by developing a model to show how major delays occur on our roads, with no apparent cause.

Their model revealed that slowing down below a critical speed when reacting to such an event, a driver would force the car behind to slow down further and the next car back to reduce its speed further still.

The jam moves backwards through the traffic creating a so-called ‘backward travelling wave’

the main issue is around the smoothness of traffic flow. According to the model, heavy traffic will not automatically lead to congestion but can be smooth-flowing.

The research team now plans to develop a model for cars equipped with new electronic devices, which could cut down on over-braking as a result of slow reactions.

Clip Source: journals.royalsociety.org

Subcritical Hopf bifurcations in a car-following model with reaction-time delay

Gábor Orosz and Gábor Stépán

PDF (333 kb) HTML

Tags: traffic, math, mathematics, traffic jam, cars, paper, pdf

Seasonal Affective Disorder: new light

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:14:44 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

In a few days, the winter solstice will plunge us into the longest and darkest night of the year. Is it any surprise that we humans respond with a holiday season of relentless cheer and partying?

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Ward Schumaker

Times Health Guide: SAD »

Readers' Comments

How does winter, and the lack of sunlight, affect you?

Read All Comments »

It doesn’t work for everyone, though. As daylight wanes, millions begin to feel depressed, sluggish and socially withdrawn. They also tend to sleep more, eat more and have less sex. By spring or summer the symptoms abate, only to return the next autumn.

Once regarded skeptically by the experts, seasonal affective disorder, SAD for short, is now well established.

Researchers have noted a similarity between SAD symptoms and seasonal changes in other mammals, particularly those that sensibly pass the dark winter hibernating in a warm hole.

Do humans do the same?

Tags: sad, evolutionary psychology

Foucault: sex, madness and society

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:11:07 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.edstrong.blog-city.com

Michel Foucault, a magnificent eclectic thinker
One reason why his writings can be hard
to grasp is that they undermine
“common sense” notions about history
His work describes the history of things
that are typically assumed not to have a “history”
– madness, medicine, prisons or sexuality

It is typically accepted that people “go mad”, “develop mental health problems”, or “lose the use of their reason” – in all periods and all societies.

Likewise, sex is often presented as a biological function, which suggests you can’t write a history of sex any more than you can write a history of breathing.

It follows that the historian can only describe attitudes to madness or sex. Mad people are put in chains, asked to talk about their dreams or given pills. Men who have sex with other men are hanged or allowed to marry.

In Shakespeare’s era, madness was believed to provide a fascinating opening into a different level of reality. Nowadays we treat it as an illness to be cured.

Tags: foucault, sex, madness

All our thinking is based on Feelings

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:13:56 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: John Hellevig's website is rich and thick with good stuff. It includes a copy of his exciting book about how we are creatures who feel first and foremost. For me, it has been one of the best finds of 2007, and if I came upon it by reference from another Clipper, yo her or him my love!

Clip Source: www.hellevig.net

language fundamentally is about interpretation of feelings.

I place language after emotions and feelings at the top of the development of the human biological homeostatic system. With language the human strives to give expression to infinite needs to interpret feelings.

All science builds on the wrong idea that knowledge can be expressed in an exact manner in language. Too many even think that there are some truths to be found in language, but the truth is in the feelings, and language is only the tool for expressing the feelings, or more correctly: giving expression to the interpretation of the feelings, and that is an infinite endeavor, a never-ending story.

The unity of manifold, is not a physical unity, it is rather the holistic web of perceptions that reduce all aspects of human life to language, to words, to aspects of feelings, to the binary mode of pain and pleasure.

move beyond language to see that the philosophical problems disappear – and beyond language we have feelings.

Tags: john hellevig, interpretation and expression of feelings

Algebra, zero and algorithm - not a bad legacy.

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 02:36:42 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk

Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi

about 790 - about 840

Click the picture above
to see two larger pictures

Al'Khwarizmi was an Islamic mathematician who wrote on Hindu-Arabic numerals and was among the first to use zero as a place holder in positional base notation. The word algorithm derives from his name. His algebra treatise Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala gives us the word algebra and can be considered as the first book to be written on algebra.

Clip Source: www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk

We know few details of Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi's life. One unfortunate effect of this lack of knowledge seems to be the temptation to make guesses based on very little evidence. In [1] Toomer suggests that the name al-Khwarizmi may indicate that he came from Khwarizm south of the Aral Sea in central Asia

An Iranian Philosopher: dissent and thinking

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 07:49:34 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: 'verbal violence': so thick in discourse it is taken for granted, made invisible.

Clip Source: chronicle.com

Ramin Jahanbegloo, the Iranian philosopher who won notice in recent years for his courageous conferences that built bridges to the liberal West, who invited such major Western apostles of free speech as Jürgen Habermas to Tehran.

"Doing philosophy in a country like Iran,"

"as in many other countries, is a work of dissidence ... but philosophy for me since Socrates is a work of dissidence. It's not just because of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It teaches you, and you teach others, how to think otherwise. To question and to criticize."

one must "search for the humanity behind the inhuman," that a philosopher's most important task is to fight violence, intolerance, and inhumanity.

"You know, being on the side of violence is wrong: verbal violence, moral violence, military violence."

a Sorbonne-educated thinker, who has published more than 20 books and sees himself as a votary of Isaiah Berlin's liberalism as well as Gandhi's and the Dalai Lama's nonviolent activism.

Tags: ramin jahanbegloo, philosophy

Clipmarks | ouyangwulong's Learning collection

Eternalism, Nihilism: new forms, old superstition

840 CE: Trade between Viking Scandinavia and the Arab World

Huge Viking Hoard Discovered in Sweden

Dinosaur Skin Mag: Hot chicks, skin totally preserved!

Where the Heck do Fortune Cookies Come From? (In Bed)

Solving a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a cookie

Psychadelic Dim Sum! Chinese Breed Glowing Mutant Pigs

Glowing Pig Passes Genes to Piglets

Wetland thrives beneath the Antarctic Ice

Antarctica May Contain "Oasis of Life"

Splat that pike! Disfigure that peacock! - words for early modern festive occasions

Why Are Pygmies Short?

Our Solar System formed 4568 million years ago

Earliest Stage of Planet Formation Dated

Traffic jam mystery solved by mathematicians

Traffic jam mystery solved by mathematicians

Seasonal Affective Disorder: new light

Related

Times Health Guide: SAD »

Readers' Comments

Foucault: sex, madness and society

Michel Foucault, a magnificent eclectic thinkerOne reason why his writings can be hard to grasp is that they undermine “common sense” notions about history His work describes the history of things that are typically assumed not to have a “history” – madness, medicine, prisons or sexuality

All our thinking is based on Feelings

Algebra, zero and algorithm - not a bad legacy.

Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi

about 790 - about 840

An Iranian Philosopher: dissent and thinking