tag > Culture
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"If you want to hide something, put it where everyone can see it." - The oldest maxim in the intelligence business
Hidden in plain sight lies the insight that...
Reality is subjective and context is king
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"A computer can never be held accountable" - An IBM slide from 1979. Have things changed since?
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Today in "the fall of western civilization": So many thing collapsing into insanity, its pointless to mention.
"Increasingly, Western society is an open-air mental asylum run by psychopaths."
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Senjoukaku is a shrine building in Hiroshima Prefecture. Construction halted suddenly in 1598, since the building consists of a single floor space, 1419m². The floor is 4" thick boards of camphor tree, never polished never repaired, worn to a mirror smoothness over the centuries.
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The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. Oil on canvas painting by Edward Poynter, 1890.
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Bring in the clones: Instagrammers are genetically replicating their pets
Courtney Udvar-Hazy and her cloned dog, Phoenix Together, these furry duplicates are normalizing the world of animal cloning -- and they could be ushering in an era of petfluencer immortality. "Someone could clone their pet and replace the original. The world doesn't have to know. They may never know," says Melain Rodriguez, client service manager at ViaGen, which is behind the cloning of all the animals mentioned in this article. "Especially if it's one that looks exactly the same and they can just continue with that pet." (Rodriguez notes that the cloned pets aren't "reincarnations" and will have different personalities than their predecessors.) [...] The process, however, is complicated and expensive. The price tag for cloning a pet ranges anywhere from $35,000 to $50,000, depending on the animal. "It's very similar to IVF," explains Rodriguez.
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This Is No Way to Be Human - We now occupy a nearly natureless world - By Alan Lightman
For more than 99 percent of our history as humans, we lived close to nature. We lived in the open. The first house with a roof appeared only 5,000 years ago. Television less than a century ago. Internet-connected phones only about 30 years ago. Over the large majority of our 2-million-year evolutionary history, Darwinian forces molded our brains to find kinship with nature, what the biologist E. O. Wilson called “biophilia.” That kinship had survival benefit. Habitat selection, foraging for food, reading the signs of upcoming storms all would have favored a deep affinity with nature. Social psychologists have documented that such sensitivities are still present in our psyches today. Further psychological and physiological studies have shown that more time spent in nature increases happiness and well-being; less time increases stress and anxiety. Thus, there is a profound disconnect between the natureless environment we have created and the “natural” affections of our minds. In effect, we live in two worlds: a world in close contact with nature, buried deep in our ancestral brains, and a natureless world of the digital screen and constructed environment, fashioned from our technology and intellectual achievements. We are at war with our ancestral selves. The cost of this war is only now becoming apparent.
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The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality. Linguistic relativity stands in close relation to semiotic-level concerns with the general relation of language and thought, and to discourse-level concerns with how patterns of language use in cultural context can affect thought.
Related: 🗣️ A Look Into Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis and Ethnolinguistics: Does Language Effect What We Perceive? 🗣️ Genocidal Organ 🗣️ Magical Words: General Semantics & the Power of Language
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OFO - Holy communication device with wireless capability - In Igbo Culture
An Ofo is a votive object which is pointed at the sky when prayers are offered, particularly to Chuku. After the fiasco of bringing death to the world he really did need a more reliable method of communicating with his creation. Presumably the Ofo boosts the signal of weak invocations. Think of it as a sort of remote control communication device for O.F.O.s — Omnipotent Flying Objects.
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Every day there are dozens of cases all over the Dark Web that escalate to this underground justice system and patiently wait for the high-ranking authorized cybercriminals (usually members of a forum administration) to solve the dispute and assign a winner and loser. Much like the United States judicial system, this whole process begins with a dispute between two opposing sides.
