Here’s a rather disheartening romp through the US public education system, now tossed into a Romano-Briton gladiatorial ring and pitted against the Christian text book publishing racket.
The poor defanged beasts hardly stand a chance, with what little financial support allowed to them siphoned off by quasi-private institutions that placate and patronise God-fearing parents with creationist curriculum. The twenty-two theses levied against the syllabus in the article illustrate not only droning ignorance but also unchecked propaganda and nutty conspiracies—which are not unique to this group’s agenda or even this day and age. Rather what appears most tragic in all of this, outlandish claims included, is in the disdain and contempt for which the programme holds for free-thinking and independent thought. Parents, both in the US and UK, may believe that their children are schooled nearer to God (or maybe at least a safe distance away from those Sharia magnet schools that everyone’s talking about) but it’s about as far as one can stray, since the instruction is very disengaging and fosters no curiosity, intellectual or spiritual.
Wednesday 4 February 2015
eschat and eschew
Saturday 31 January 2015
augury
catagories: ๐, ๐ง , philosophy
Tuesday 27 January 2015
blockchain or turing-complete
รon Magazine poses a pretty arresting question, siphoned through the spelunking machinery and quarrying activities that underpins the integrity and flow of alternative, shadow currencies: are humans ready to jettison the managers and middle-men for autonomous companies that need minimal human supervision?
catagories: ๐ฑ, ๐ฅธ, labour, philosophy, technology and innovation
Sunday 25 January 2015
precept, percept
catagories: ๐ง , networking and blogging, philosophy
Saturday 24 January 2015
like a feather on god’s breath
Though not entirely alone among accomplished and influential women of the Middle Ages in Europe, the fascinating life and career of twelfth century Abbess Hildegarde von Bingen did strike me as a pleasant rediscovery and one that certainly bears further investigation to appreciate her contributions fully.
Born as the tenth child to a family of minor nobility along the Rhine, Hildegarde was basically tithed to the Church and given over to a convent at a very young age. Her early life and traditional formative years were punctuated with visions—which were miraculous enough in itself, which she kept to herself, professing herself to be an unworthy vessel and inadequate messenger, and found her voice, so to speak, in middle age. Outside of this context, Hildegarde’s erudition and research—notably including the composition and scoring of hundreds of pieces of holy music (A Feather on the Breath of God was the title of one of her canticles), extensive studies in medicine, advocating the boiling of water of all things, and taxonomy of flora and fauna (which maybe three hundred years later inspired Dame Juliana Berners to group animals together with the most fanciful and creative collective terms, like a murder of crows or a murmuration of starlings) was brilliant and earned her the eventual recognition as a Doctor of the Church (bestowed by Pope Benedict in 2012), but what I find particularly amazing was that her life really did begin at forty and instead of retiring to quiet contemplation—at a time when people didn’t usually survive that long to begin with, really took ownership of what might be called a mid-life crisis and resolved to share her gifts.
Hildegarde’s resurgence in recent years is doubtlessly a grave oversight in history that needs amending but may be in part due to particularly liberated and thoroughly modern echoes in her life that resound with contemporary movements. Though claiming that all of her learning and works were the products of divine inspiration, as a woman she petitioned the Pope and played a major role in Church politics and even preached herself, her homeopathic practises fit right in today, for being a nun she said quite a lot about sexuality and could be considered the first person to pursue a course in gender-studies, not only developed chants and penned devotional songs but also wrote an elaborate musical in a morality play set to her own compositions. Moreover, she authored an illustrated exegesis of her own visions and invented a language and script that was kind of a coded pastiche of Latin and German that Hildegarde deemed more suited for those enigmatic and perplexing revelations that came to her, which she always felt incapable of fully disclosing. Some partial copies of her codex have been preserved but the complete Scivias (some six-hundred pages) disappeared in the tumult of war in 1945 from a vault in Dresden.
Thursday 15 January 2015
epimetheus/prometheus
Happy Mutant and accomplished author in his own right Cory Doctorow extolls the latest fantasy novel from Jo Walton. Not only does this plot in which a time-traveling Athena, goddess of Wisdom, assembles all the faithful from all ages who yearned to live in the Utopia of Philosopher Kings sound really intriguing, her other works, which include award-winning alternate histories, expositions on ancient lore and future-oriented works of science fiction, are appealing to my curiosity already.
catagories: ๐, myth and monsters, networking and blogging, philosophy
Friday 9 January 2015
mood board
Writing for Mental Floss, Miss Cellania introduces us to some clever alternatives to the boilerplate, filler text “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” Sort of like the classic Kant-Generator, my favourite of the bunch is the Samuel L Ipsum. Unlike the other engines, however, that return gibberish based on a certain genre, the sample text that is delivered are actual blocks of dialogue spoken by the characters Mister Jackson has portrayed:
And unlike the greeking that’s characterised the lorem ipsum (since it’s not even sensible Latin), one runs the risk of having readers focus on what the text says, rather than how the text-layout and type-speciment looks in the presentation.
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐, language, philosophy
Thursday 8 January 2015
iconodule
Celebrated on the first Sunday of the Great Lent (1 March, this year), the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy celebrates the restoration of icons, holy images, to the Church, and the victory of the iconodules—those who venerate images, the iconophiles over the iconoclasts who considered the practise idolatry.
catagories: ☦️, ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ท๐บ, ๐น๐ท, ๐, philosophy, revolution
Sunday 4 January 2015
oh, du frรถhliche!
For this first weekend after the New Year finding many agonising over resolutions, Brain Pickings presents a nice book-review of a vintage, seminal work by Friedrich Nietzsche called Die Frรถhliche Wissenschaft—usually translated as the Gay Science.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐ง , holidays and observances, philosophy, religion
Thursday 1 January 2015
null-set or four-squares
รon Magazine features a really inviting and illuminating essay from earlier this Summer on how Eastern thought, Buddhism in particular, which can come across to Western-thinkers as hopelessly mystical and too pliable for admitting contradictions, while saying nothing about inherent truths in any system, prevision—in a sense—and converge in the logical constructs of mathematics, modern set-theories which have applications in computing and high-level physics.
The article illustrates this range of connexions through parentage and siblings: mother of is functional since any son or daughter has just one, whereas son of or sister of is relative since there could be any number of permutations, dependent on the family or none at all. This article and discussion is certainly something to step away from and reflect on—rather than reading in one sitting, but it is without a doubt fascinating that mathematicians and logicians came to restore to the same quiver of paradigms as Eastern philosophies, without being some closeted mystic or Buddha-apologist. The fifth option, which could explode into all sorts of other dimensions, is what’s called the ineffable (a pretty neat sounding word): when those paradoxes and fundamental contradictions are handed down to us, seemingly only for the sake of confusion, a kลan—the sound of one hand clapping, we have to admit that it’s an experience too big to get our heads around and thus unspeakable. Presented with this possibilities—that there are things in the cosmos which we cannot articulate or even perceive, certainly seems very real and probably comprises an infinitely bigger part of reality, it seems however that we are just pushing back contradiction by a few powers, which may be significant in itself, by knowing of something that we can’t hope to address or not knowing about it at all.
Monday 29 December 2014
the art of asking or just take the doughnuts
Thoreau did also graciously accept help when offered by kindred spirits—including fellow author Ralph Waldo Emerson and his mother and sister who brought the hermit doughnuts. Most of us would think less of what Thoreau created because of that detail. What do you think? Do such aspirations only belong in the rarified world of artists or is it a universal and daily struggle?
catagories: ๐, ๐ง , lifestyle, philosophy
Saturday 27 December 2014
rat-race
catagories: ๐จ๐ญ, ๐, ๐ง , labour, philosophy
Monday 22 December 2014
non-canon or holy terror
Columnist Candida Moss approaches the subject of the lack of a biography of Jesus during His K-12 years, childhood and adolescence into early adulthood, through an apocryphal gospel known as the ฮ ฮฮฮIฮฮ (the Book of Childhood Deeds) or the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (original link times out, so here is an alternate Wikipedia article on the subject) written sometime in the second century.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฏ๐ต, ✝️, ✡️, ๐, ๐, ๐, Middle East, philosophy
Monday 15 December 2014
iconography or graven images
A very interesting set of quite different factors and historical influences came together, I recently learnt, in the fourth century to establish rich artistic traditions that allowed the Buddha, the Christ and the panoply of the Hindu gods to be portrayed in human forms for the first time and in a manner that was cultural diffuse and immediately recognisable. Though these movements took place around the same time, the religions were at different stages of development and acceptance at this point—what with the Brahmin’s gods already enjoying milennia of devotion, Siddhฤrtha Gautama having achieved enlightenment some eight hundred years prior and the latest incarnation of the Abrahamic faith in its fourth century. Despite these difference, they all started adopting pictorial representations around the same time.
A maturing network of international trade is of course a contributing factor, as being able to mediate on a shared image of how Jesus and company ought to look rather than relying on more abstract translated texts and interpreted teachings would spread these big religions and ensure their survival, but it is not the whole story. Before we got to the images of the serene Buddha and Jesus Christ in his characteristic poses, the story of these two was communicated through symbolism, teaching aides that represented the bodhi tree, the footprint of Buddha or the Cross, the sign of the fisher of men. And while it does seem natural and an effective step that the adherents of Buddhism would create figures of a limited and iconic variety for the benefit of foreigners being introduced to the philosophy, for Christianity it was a break with ancient traditions and taboos of not depicting God or His manifestations. The decision to show Jesus as a man may have happened in part because Constantine around this time declared that faith the official one of the empire, and Romans and Greeks, used to having statues of Dionysus, Hercules or Nike decorating their villas with triumphant flair, thought it was acceptable to have even more glorious statues of Jesus on display. As with Buddhism, the move was probably also good for the edification of foreign-speakers. Some three hundred years later, during the first few decades of the faith, Islam restored the proscription again representing the divine by human-hands by issuing currency for the Caliphate that only bore the word of God, instead of coins bearing the image of the head-of-state or other trappings.
Tuesday 9 December 2014
chronotype
catagories: ๐, ๐ง , lifestyle, philosophy
Monday 8 December 2014
wunderkammer or department of antiquities
Though I had been hearing the series cited and praised by several sources, I have only just now begun to indulge BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum’s co-production of A History of the World in One Hundred Objects—which is brilliantly and joyously highbrow and erudite listening, though has since expanded to other media and ambitiously invites the audience to tell their own stories through the collected artefacts of affiliated treasuries. The series is really well constructed and does not presume to present an authoritative lesson but rather thoughtfully present a series of items that represent the various aspects that have contributed to our understanding of the human condition: not all curators or visitors would pick the same assortment or think of them in the same ways, necessarily, but all narratives coming out of the galleries eventually cross have story arcs in common.
There are quite a lot of these homages to humility—important when it comes to such an undertaking, for instance in dispelling the idea that museums, either by turns musty old places or serene repositories, are anything but static—artefacts forever revising the stories that they can share, thanks to our enhanced understanding about different historical contexts and thanks to advancing methods for researching and unlocking those secrets. Certainly some lovely old bones or pottery shards were intriguing enough finds at first, but under a new light (of cultural understanding or more precise dating) give up even more and the yield is yet unexhausted. Listen to a few episodes and I am sure you’ll be engaged as well.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, ๐จ, ๐ก, ๐ง , antiques, libraries and museums, philosophy, transportation, travel, Wikipedia
Monday 1 December 2014
lykkefรธlelse
The Norwegian edition of The Local features an interview with a publishing-professor from the University of Tromsรธ whose latest project is assaying the notion of happiness. Of course, happiness is more than just an emotional response and an outlook and code of behaviour, but not necessarily a dogmatic one, as the author suggests, insofar as permanence and aversion to change are not the metrics that happiness for most people are measured by.
Rather than the hedonistic notion of becoming the perpetually punch-drunk gadfly that first got the author interested in the question, happiness is also to be found in change and challenge—exemplified by the Scandinavian double-barreled question how are you doing/how are you coping, “Hvordan du hard et/hvordan du tar det?” That’s a very provoking parallel construction that is not just limited to these icy climes and six months of no sun—the campus being above the Arctic Circle. On the media’s role in shaping our feelings and stance, the author also makes a very poignant observation that sensational, responsible, impassioned or neutral alike, the news and the broader entertainment industry is propelled by sponsorship, whose purpose is either to validate and reinforce opinions, loyalties that one already shares or to make one feel inadequate and uncertain about present allegiances. Sometimes that may be a good thing but I don’t think most marketers are concerned about the examined life. While this manipulation and patronage is no doubt true and important—and the author does not pose a problem without offering at least the glimmer of a solution—that pronouncement does strike me as typical Norse.
catagories: ๐ณ๐ด, ๐ง , lifestyle, philosophy
Thursday 27 November 2014
lycanthrope or heutoscopic
I had always thought that the majority of the corporeal menagerie of beastly creatures could be chalked-up to dull glances and keen imaginations, like witnessing the novelty of horseback riding and constructing the centaur—to be later embellished with a mythological pedigree and literary tradition.
I am learning, however, that chimera—and not just to philosophically quizzical kind from Greek lore (like our old friend, poor sad Cyclopes, whom was just a normal oafish giant until he traded one eye for the ability to see into the future—however, that gift of foresight was limited to being able to see his time of death), often carry a pretty heady cerebral burden as well, which may not have followed too long after or may well be the manifestations our mental-constructs were looking to project. I had believed that werewolves and were-bears (Beowulf means bee-hunter or rather honey-bear) were frightened hearsay from survivors who had encountered fierce warriors who dressed in animal skins and head-dresses, and while that may be the original inspiration from an outside perspective, there was also something highly ritualistic and complex going on for those who donned and doffed the pelts themselves. Like the game-face of the brutal Achaean fighter Ajax, the ancient Vikings also had a tradition of working themselves into a frenzied rage before going into battle, making themselves berserk.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฎ๐ธ, ๐ณ๐ด, ๐ง , language, myth and monsters, philosophy, religion
Friday 21 November 2014
lexis-nexus or a language is a dialect with an army and a flag
catagories: ๐, foreign policy, language, philosophy
Wednesday 19 November 2014
think different or the great and final samฤdhi
Writing for the ever excellent Boing Boing, Jason Louv presents a very fine accounting of the parting gift that Steve Jobs shared with those friends, family members and associates, copies of the Autobiography of a Yogi, with a biography of the guru challenged to come to America to impart Hindu meditation to the West. The yogi’s story and success in introducing some of these practices in the 1920s and 30s have a significant legacy and have impacted many. As the author lucidly demonstrates, however, the notions of yoga and relaxation as imported—without a guru to oversee the export—become rather muddled, since the mental exercises are only aides, discipline-builders and not ends in themselves: meditation is not about self-help but rather liberation from self. The idea of abandoning one’s identity to be subsumed by the Cosmos does rather chafe at the ideals held by many Americans about self-reliance and selfhood and does seem infinitely elusive, but objectivity, tranquility and the courage to look inward is something that we can all strive for.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ง , philosophy, religion