***

What death? what discipline?
What bonds no man could unbind
Being imagined within
The labyrinth of the mind?
What pursuing or fleeing?
What wounds, what bloody press?
Dragged into being
This loveliness.

W-B. Yeats

среди ночи чего-то вспомнилось, в оригинале красивее, хотя мне нравится русский перевод где “Какие бегство, погоня, и чьи кровавые руки подобное совершенство вытащили со дна”

У трикстеров есть особое право – право быть в этом мире чужими, а это означает, что, находясь на дистанции по отношению к миру, который они оценивают как ложный, ни с одним из жизненных положений они не солидаризируются.

Понравилось

“  Сирена уже замолкла, но красный вращающийся фонарь на крыше «скорой» продолжал крутиться, отбрасывая пурпурные отсветы на стены больницы. Чистое голубое небо разливало покой, который, обнимая землю, создавал некий звуковой вакуум вокруг машины «скорой помощи», выхватив ее из уличного шума, подобно тому как луч прожектора выхватывает из темноты деталь пейзажа. “

Кодзи Судзуки, “Спираль”

Успокаивает

Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of еhe orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists continually sucking orderliness from its environment. This conclusion is less paradoxical than it appears at first sight. Rather could it be blamed for triviality. Indeed, in the case of higher animals we know the kind of orderliness they feed upon well enough, viz. the extremely well-ordered state of matter in more or less complicated organic compounds, which serve them as foodstuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form -not entirely degraded, however, for plants can still make use of it. (These, of course, have their most power supply of ‘negative entropy’ the sunlight)

давайте что ли поиграем, попробуйте угадать, кто автор приведенной цитаты, не заглядывая в поисковики. Автора вы точно знаете, имя на слуху.

перевод под катом Читать далее

War is Peace

Немного расплывчато, но с основными тезисами согласна абсолютно:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

[...]
Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half-hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day.


And 24-hour news channels, desperate to provide ”breaking” coverage at all hours, end up serving as public relations vehicles for any celebrity who happens to make an outrageous claim or, worse, decide that the competition for ratings requires them to be anything but ”fair and balanced” in their reporting.

“Fair and balanced,” however, doesn’t mean putting all viewpoints, regardless of their underlying logic or validity, on an equal footing. Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday’s newspaper. One doesn’t need to debate about whether the earth is flat or 6,000 years old. These claims can safely be discarded, and have been, by the scientific method.

Статья полностью

8)) ‘you may have seen me in the movies’

‘What we really need is an alternative paradigm that gives us a new and better way of thinking and acting. The new approach should provide a range of insights that enable commanders to instantly conceptualize a pattern of multidimensional possibilities that lead to breakthrough concepts and values because the traditional strategic linear way of thinking and acting is inadequate, given the nature of the
postmodern era. The preferred new paradigm must have several characteristics that set it apart from the strategic paradigm: Читать далее

воспитание

Хотите еще маленькую историю из жизни моей семьи? Вскоре после свадьбы моих родителей моя мать поскользнулась на скользком паркете замка. Когда она рассказывала моему отцу об этом, он заметил сухо: Все замечают, что ты не выросла в замке, иначе ты могла бы бегать по паркету…

…От моей матери я научилась тому, что принцесса должна сохранять спокойствие в каждой ситуации. Например, не визжать истерически, если паук бежит у нее по руке. Кроме того, нужно с ответственностью относиться к традициям и истории. Поэтому, найти постоянного партнера с такими условиями достаточно сложно».

Виктория, Кронпринцесса Швеции, интервью накануне свадьбы.

Самые адекватные королевские семьи в порядке убывания: Норвежская, Шведская и Голландская.
особенно если сравнивать с тем, что в Британии происходит в этом плане.

ВОВ

Ну и всем, кому тема интересна
я когда-то говорила про отрывок из ветеранских мемуаров, где про танковое сражение очень интересно.
Я его нашла (под катом).
Читать далее

правильное об интеллектуальном уровне “цивилизованных” людей

My perspective on this controversy comes from 33 years of working with New Guineans in their own intact societies. From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I’m with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not.
It’s easy to recognize two reasons why my impression that New Guineans are smarter than Westerners may be correct. First, Europeans have for thousands of years been living in densely populated societies with central governments, police, and judiciaries. In those societies, infectious epidemic diseases of dense populations (such as smallpox) were historically the major cause of death, while murders were relatively uncommon and a state of war was the exception rather than the rule. Most Europeans who escaped fatal infections also escaped other potential causes of death and proceeded to pass on their genes. Today, most live-born Western infants survive fatal infections as well and reproduce themselves, regardless of their intelligence and the genes they bear. In contrast, New Guineans have been living in societies where human numbers were too low for epidemic diseases of dense populations to evolve. Instead, traditional New Guineans suffered high mortality from murder, chronic tribal warfare, accidents, and problems in procuring food.
Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A. That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.
Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults. Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation. This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans.
That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. Certainly, there is no hint at all of any intellectual dissadvantage of New Guineans that could serve to answer Yali’s question.

перевод под катом Читать далее

But the real reason is that the subject is enjoyable, and although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentalization is really artificial, and we should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them.

The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Volume I. Algebra.

10x 4 u_ask