Jing-reed's Musings from Thailand

TED Talks Censured

I recall the pleasure with which I discovered my first TED Talk on Youtube.  At last something substancial and worth watching on YouTube.

TED, globally known as a showcase of ideas, hosts “fascinating thinkers and doers” who occupy a stage for 18 minutes or less to share their ideas with a global audience. Started in 1984, TED began as “a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.”

TED’s mission statement reads:

    “We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world. So we’re building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.”


Imagine my dismay when recently I disovered that two TED talks had been posted, and then removed from YouTube.  

TED, the popular conference organizer, recently censured two  contributors for their TEDx talks, and cancelled an upcoming TEDx event due to the participation of two others. The four share an interest in the possibility that consciousness extends beyond the brain.  In an open letter, Ken Jordan, Reality Sdandwich's publisher and editorial director, invited TED's curator, Chris Anderson, to an online forum to explain his action.

I may, or may not, agree with Dr. Sheldrake's assertion that 'consciousness extends beyond the brain', but more importantly I feel that I have the right to make my own decision about his view of science.


Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's TEDx talk censored by the 'scientific board' of TED and removed from YouTube.  It was later reposted by someone not associated with TED Talks.

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Dr. Rupert Sheldrake talks about his banned TED talk on Skeptiko with Alex Tsakiris

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Chris Langan

"Christopher Michael Langan (born c. 1952) is an American autodidact whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at between 195 and 210. Billed by some media sources as "the smartest man in America", he rose to prominence in 1999 while working as a bouncer on Long Island. Langan has developed his own "theory of the relationship between mind and reality" which he calls the "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)"

Mr. Langan lives a simple life on a horse ranch in Missouri with his wife and numerous animals. 

Langan has said that he does not belong to any religious denomination, explaining that he "can't afford to let [his] logical approach to theology be prejudiced by religious dogma", yet he does believe in God.  He has stated that that "we all exist in what can be called "the Mind of God", and that our individual minds are parts of God's Mind. They are not as powerful as God's Mind, for they are only parts thereof; yet, they are directly connected to the greatest source of knowledge and power that exists. This connection of our minds to the Mind of God, which is like the connection of parts to a whole, is what we sometimes call the soul or spirit, and it is the most crucial and essential part of being human".

Live Moderated Chat: Christopher Langan

     Interview with Chris Langan  - Part 1 of 3

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Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria

Hypatia  [ca. AD 350–370] was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, who was a teacher of mathematics with the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt.  A center of Greek intellectual and cultural life, the Museum included many independent schools and the great library of Alexandria.

Hypatia studied with her father, and with many others including Plutarch the Younger. She herself taught at the Neoplatonist school of philosophy. She became the salaried director of this school in 400. She probably wrote on mathematics, astronomy and philosophy, including about the motions of the planets, about number theory and about conic sections.

Hypatia corresponded with and hosted scholars from others cities. Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, was one of her correspondents and he visited her frequently. Hypatia was a popular lecturer, drawing students from many parts of the empire.

From the little historical information about Hypatia that survives, it appears that she invented the plane astrolabe, the graduated brass hydrometer and the hydroscope, with Synesius of Greece, who was her student and later colleague.

Hypatia dressed in the clothing of a scholar or teacher, rather than in women's clothing. She moved about freely, driving her own chariot, contrary to the norm for women's public behavior. She exerted considerable political influence in the city.

Orestes, the governor of Alexandria, like Hypatia, was a pagan (non-Christian). Orestes was an adversary of the new Christian bishop, Cyril, a future saint. Orestes, according to the contemporary accounts, objected to Cyril expelling the Jews from the city, and was murdered by Christian monks for his opposition.

Cyril probably objected to Hypatia on a number of counts: She represented heretical teachings, including experimental science and pagan religion. She was an associate of Orestes. And she was a woman who didn't know her place. Cyril's preaching against Hypatia is said to have been what incited a mob led by fanatical Christian monks in 415 to attack Hypatia as she drove her chariot through Alexandria. They dragged her from her chariot and, according to accounts from that time, stripped her, killed her, stripped her flesh from her bones, scattered her body parts through the streets, and burned some remaining parts of her body in the library of Caesareum.



Hypatia's students fled to Athens, where the study of mathematics flourished after that. The Neoplatonic school she headed continued in Alexandria until the Arabs invaded in 642.

When the library of Alexandria was burned by the Arab conquerors, used as fuel for baths, the works of Hypatia were destroyed. We know her writings today through the works of others who quoted her -- even if unfavorably -- and a few letters written to her by contemporaries.

Hypatia and Alexandria 1/5

Hypatia and Alexandria 2/5

Hypatia and Alexandria 3/5

Hypatia and Alexandria 4/5

Hypatia and Alexandria 5/5

Cloud Atlas

This week the New Yorker presents a lengthy profile of Lana and Andy Wachowski. those award winning filmmakers who produced the Matrix films, and the forthcoming 'Cloud Atlas'.


Beyond the Matrix

"The Wachowskis travel to even more mind-bending realms.

On the monitor screen, Tom Hanks’s eyes, in extreme closeup, flickered through a complicated sequence of emotions: hatred, fear, anger, doubt. “Cut!” Lana Wachowski shouted. The crew on Stage 9 at Babelsberg Studio, near Berlin, erupted in a din of professional efficacy, preparing for the next shot, while Hanks returned to his chair to sip coffee from an NPR cup. Lana and her brother, Andy, who are best known for writing and directing the “Matrix” trilogy, were shooting “Cloud Atlas,” an adaptation of David Mitchell’s 2004 best-selling novel of the same name.

The novel has six story lines, and the Wachowskis and their close friend the German director Tom Tykwer, with whom they’d written the script, had divided them up. They were shooting at Babelsberg, using the same actors, who shuttled between soundstages, but Tykwer had an unplanned day off. Halle Berry had broken her foot while on location in Mallorca and he needed to wait for her full recovery to shoot a chase scene. And now there was another problem: the actor Ralph Riach, who played a small but crucial role in one of the story lines that Tykwer was working on, had fallen ill and been hospitalized, and his state was progressively worsening. Tykwer had been on the phone with Riach, and the prognosis was, at best, unpredictable. Tykwer, with a bad cold and a large scarf around his neck which resembled a Renaissance millstone collar, had stopped by the Wachowskis’ set to discuss the situation. . . . . "

...“Cloud Atlas’ is a twenty-first-century novel,” Lana said. “It represents a midpoint between the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning, a middle, and an end.” As she spoke, she was screwing and unscrewing two halves of some imaginary thing—its future and its past—in her hands. If the movie worked, she continued, it would allow the filmmakers to “reconnect to that feeling we had when we were younger, when we saw films that were complex and mysterious and ambiguous. You didn’t know everything instantly.”

The film opens on October 26.

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Bill Moyers Returns

Bill Moyers: Back With a New Series

"Dear Friends,

You already may have heard that I'd be coming back in January with a new series on the public television station nearest you. But you may not have heard exactly why. It's not just that I lack retirement skills, as my wife and co-editor, Judith, keeps reminding me. Or that the squeaky rocking chair on the front porch got on my nerves. I'm coming back because in tumultuous times like these I relish the company of people who try to make sense of the tumult. These are the people I'll bring to our new broadcast, Moyers & Company.

Journalism has long been for me a continuing course in adult education. Given what's happening in this country, it's time to sign up for more classes. The lack of civility and common sense that has paralyzed our democracy, the vast economic and social inequality that sends both left and right raging into the streets, the corrosive influence of money in politics - we're in a tailspin with little hope for a course correction from our elected leadership or corporate-dominated media. The need for voices of reason, simple and eloquent, has rarely been stronger. ,,,"

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The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

"God" and "gods"

One item that many place implicit faith in is the "Big Bang Theory," which tells us that the universe began 15-20 billion years ago from a single point. Who can prove to us the reality of a phenomena that took place tens of billions of years ago? There's no instant replay when we're dealing with life and time. We can't be shown what happened that far in the past. There may be some evidence and reason to believe that this is how it happened, but at the end of the day we can't know for sure and that's where 'faith' comes in

In an article, in the U.S. News and World Report, physicist Roger Penrose theorized that the Big Bang might be one in a cycle of such events, suggesting that the universe has had multiple existences. This is common knowledge to one familiar with Vedic philosophy and cosmology, which very clearly indicates that the universe has had many births and deaths.

The centuries-old wisdom of the Vedic texts doesn't stop there. They claim that our universe is just one of many universes, a concept entertained by modern science and referred to as "the multiverse theory." The description given is that our universe is one mustard seed in a bag full of a practically uncountable number of mustard seeds.

"Hinduism is the only relgion whose timescales corespond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. A night of Brahama is 8.64 billion years long - about one half of the time since the Big Bang."  It is said that men may not be the dreams of the gods, but rathere that the gods are the dreams of men."

Carl Sagan talks about "the gods." This clip is from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, episode 10, "The Edge of Forever."

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Welcome to "Possibilians"

What is possibilianism?

"Possibilianism is a philosophy which rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground. .....

    "Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."

An adherent of possibilianism is called a possibilian. The possibilian perspective is distinguished from agnosticism in that it consists of an active exploration of novel possibilities and an emphasis on the necessity of holding multiple positions at once if there is no available data to privilege one over the others.  Possibilianism reflects the scientific temperament of creativity, testing, and tolerance for multiple ideas. ...."


As frequent visitors to his site well know my personal position regarding 'religion vs science' has always been in favor of science.  However I have never felt that I could, with any certainty, comfortably call myself an atheist.  Would I consider labeling myself a 'Posibilian'???


TEDxHouston - Dr. David Eagleman

Dr. Eagleman holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Baylor College of Medicine. His areas of scientific expertise include time perception, vision, synesthesia, and the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system. He directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action, and is the Founder and Director of Baylor College of Medicine's Initiative on Neuroscience and Law. Dr. Eagleman has written several neuroscience books, including Wednesday is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia and Dethronement: The Secret Life of the Unconscious Brain.  He has also written an internationally bestselling book of literary fiction, Sum, which was named a Best Book of 2009 by Barnes and Noble, New Scientist, and the Chicago Tribune. Dr. Eagleman has written for the New York Times, Discover Magazine, Slate, and New Scientist, and he appears regularly on National Public Radio to discuss both science and literature.

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Jorge Luis Borges

I can't remember when I first encountered the works of Jorge Luis Borges, since for countless years I have felt that they have always been a part of my being. As much as I am me, Borges and his incredible writing is an integral part of that persona. 

He was Argentina’s favorite son, one of the great South American writers of the last century (along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa), and the winner of 46 national and international literary prizes.

Borges was the master of the postmodern short story.

"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make."[65] The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. [Wikipedia].

By the late 1950s, he had become completely blind. The irony of his blindness as a writer and lover of the written word was expressed in 'Seven Nights':
   
    Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
    esta declaración de la maestría
    de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
    me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

          No one should read self-pity or reproach
          Into this statement of the majesty
          Of God; who with such splendid irony,
          Granted me books and blindness at one touch

Borges was born in 1899, and to celebrate his 100th birthday (though he died in 1986), Philippe Molins directed the documentary, Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man.

The film’s major strength is that it’s a bit of everything – part biography, part literary criticism, part hero-worship, part book reading, and part psychology.  But most importantly, it is Borges.

   Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man - 1/6

 

The Modern Word, a favorite site for browsing, has a large section devoted to Borges.

Herodotus, the 'Father' of History

Two very important people in my life considered the Histories of Herodotus as an invaluable aid to the comprehension of life.  The first was my father, a professor of history at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia.  The second was Gregorio Bartoni. himself Greek-Italian, and the love of my life.  Unfortunately both of them succumbed to an early death, but both had left me with a legacy: that of the legendary Herodotus.

I have over the years had various copies of 'The Histories of Herodotus' in my possession, with passages underlined, and notes written in the margins, and then in my nomadic travels and changes of location, left them for someone else to enjoy and benefit from their wisdom.  Recently felt the desire/need to once again have Heredotus by my side, and through the magic of the Internet downloaded yet another version for my Kindle Reader. 

A new kind of literature, that of written history, was created by Herodotus. And it was through his efforts that many of the most famous accounts of antiquity have been preserved for us, such as the heroic stand of King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.  It doesn't take much imagination to realize that 'The Lonely Planet', and all the other contemporary travel guides, had their beginning based on the fact that Herodotus was the first of the travel writers. His was an ability to collect and share accounts of his own travels, as well as the passing on of tales gathered from his fellow travelers.  And yes, Count Almasy, also known as 'The English Patient', carried The Histories of Herodotus with him on all his travels.


Dr. Daniel Robinson, Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University / Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University in a lecture on Herodotus.

     Herodotus and the Lamp of History - Part 1

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     Herodotus and the Lamp of History - Part 2

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And I could not help but bring 'The Histories of Herodotus' into the 21st century with the creation of a fractal image which stylistically portrays but a representation  of his many scrolls and and an inkpot used in the writing of his manuscrips all enveloped in the swirling mists of time.

[software used, Ultrafractal and Apophysis]

      [click image to enlarge]

Civilization: Is the West History ?

Niall Ferguson: 'The left love being provoked by me ... they think I'm a reactionary imperialist scumbag'

The first thing everyone always says about Niall Ferguson is that he's far too glamorous to be an academic. So the surprise, when we meet, is his miserable little office – a bleak sliver of the London School of Economics, surely nowhere near sumptuous enough for the dashing professor. Lined with rows of empty bookshelves, it looks semi-vacated – but that's because it sort of is. "I'll be out of here in July," Ferguson says quickly, with the air of a man for whom July cannot come soon enough. "This has been great fun, but . . . well, you know . . ."

The historian has been living back in the UK for almost a year, the first time since leaving for the US in 2002, where he now teaches at Harvard. From the outside, it's looked like quite a successful stay; his Channel 4 series, Civilization, was broadly well-received, and the accompanying book is another dollop of vintage Ferguson history, devoted to the superiority of western civilisation. While here he's also been advising Michael Gove on the history curriculum in secondary schools, and now that the Tories, of whom he approves, are back in charge of the country, he must have found the political climate more to his tastes. But when I ask him for the single biggest change he's observed since leaving Britain, he replies with a kind of theatrical despair,

"I think the situation in British universities has gone from being parlous to being catastrophic. When you look at where British universities are going, and where Harvard's going, you'd have to really love other things about England to take the hit."

And he doesn't? "Well, I mean, what can I say?" he shrugs with a hollow little laugh. "There are lots of things I love about this country." But he couldn't sound less convincing, so I invite him to name some and he comes up with Radio 3 and the weather. "What else do I love about England? Hmm, there must be other things." He casts his mind about. "Well, the British private schools are really good. But they're the only institutions left in Britain that are really world class." And bam! There he is, not five minutes in, saying the sort of thing that drives liberal Britain mad.

The Glaswegian-born academic and presenter, 46, has been sending the left into fits of rage ever since he published Empire in 2003 – an elaborate cost-benefit analysis of the British empire, which concluded that it had, on the whole, been a good thing. The character of Irwin in Alan Bennett's play, The History Boys – a pushy, contrarian teacher who becomes a TV historian – is modelled on Ferguson, and ideological sparring matches with his leftwing critics, one of whom branded his work "startlingly obscene", have become something of a national sport.


Civilization program with Prof. Niall Ferguson of Harvard:

"The first programme in the series begins in 1420 when Ming China had a credible claim to be the most advanced civilization in the world: 'All Under Heaven'. England on the eve of the Wars of the Roses would have seemed quite primitive by contrast.

Yet the lead that China had established in technology was not to be translated into sustained economic growth. In China a monolithic empire stifled colonial expansion and economic innovation. In Europe political division bred competition.

The question for our own time is whether or not we have lost that competitive edge to a rapidly ascending Asia"

Part 1.  Competition: a decentralisation of political and economic life, which created the launch pad for both nation states and capitalism.
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