January 2009
113 posts
“If you have built your castles in the air, they are where they should be; now...”
– Henry David Thoreau
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'Charter 08: A grass-roots rebellion in China' →
‘The Chinese government’s approach to ‘modernization’ has proven disastrous,’ the infamous Charter 08 states. ‘It has stripped people of their rights, destroyed their dignity and corrupted normal human intercourse. So we ask: Where is China headed in the twenty-first century?’ At the heart of the document is a call for rewriting the country’s...
“‘God’ should be executed for crimes
against humanity.”
– Bryan Emmanuel Gutierrez
'What happened before the Big Bang?' →
As a general principle, nature always moves towards the state which requires the lowest amount of energy to maintain (an equilibrium). We observe this all the time. In physics, this is observed as symmetry breaking, which means that the system transforms to a less symmetrical state. The four forces of nature (electromagnetism, gravity, strong and weak nuclear force) are actually one and the same...
'Color this area of the law gray' →
Beauty, it is often said, is in the eye of the beholder, and so might be copyright infringement. Artist Richard Prince never denied that he made use of some photographic images he found in a 2000 book by Patrick Cariou called Yes Rasta, documenting the community of Rastafarians the French photographer encountered in the mountains of Jamaica, for collage paintings that were exhibited last fall at...
“In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any...”
– The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm
“And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no...”
– Obama’s inaugural speech
US pays off victims of 'collateral damage' →
US commanders on tuesday traveled to a poor Afghan village and distributed $40,000 to relatives of fifteen people killed in a US raid, including a known militant commander. The Americans also ‘apologized’ for any civilians killed in the operation. According to the villagers, ‘none of them were in the Taliban, just peaceful individuals from the village’. So that’s,...
'USDA rains dead birds onto New Jersey town' →
The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirms it is responsible for a controlled kill to reduce the European starling population. Township manager Ken Daly says the USDA placed seeds tainted with poison at a local farm to kill as many as 5,000 of the birds. ‘The birds eat the seed and metabolize the poison and die with 24 hours,’ he tells WCBS. ‘Once they metabolize, the poison is...
'Irrational intelligence; get smarter' →
Our understanding of intelligence has been muddled by the discrepancy between the vague, comprehensive vernacular term, which encompasses all the functions and manifestations of ‘smarts’, and the narrower theories that ‘confine the concept of intelligence to the set of mental abilities actually tested on extant IQ tests’. The latter conceptualization allows intelligence to...
'British man murders wife over Facebook status' →
Last May, Edward Richardson, 41, became enraged when his wife Sarah, 26, changed her marital status on the internet social networking site to ‘single’, and decided to go and see her as she was not responding to his [text] messages. He then stabbed her to death in a ‘frenzied and brutal’ attack at her parents’ home in Biddulph, central England. Wow …
“Nature seems to abhor sameness at least as much as vacuums, for nowhere in the...”
– Foundations of Interpersonal Communication
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'First expat TV show in Holland' →
On 26 January, broadcasting company TV West is launching West International, the first TV programme for the international community in the Netherlands. ‘It’s a real TV magazine; we’ll be touching on everything,’ says Brown, ‘It’s about all kinds of things relevant to internationals living away from their home country such as health issues, religion, finance, schooling,...
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“When you express an idea, you never communicate your meaning exactly or totally;...”
– Foundations of Interpersonal Communication
'Bone marrow cures HIV patient' →
‘Researchers in Berlin [have] said [that] the man, who suffered from leukaemia and HIV, has shown no sign of either disease since the [bone marrow] transplant two years ago.’
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