Ali Di > Recent Status Updates

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My life has not been built on events. My life is in my thoughts.

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So I am going to write the story of my life. But what life? Have I even lived?

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As Walt Whitman wrote, we contain multitudes. We all at times have behaved badly. Should we be judged only by the bad? If so, many other artists would be dismissed, ignored, and vilified:
Caravaggio, who was a low life and a murderer; Wagner, a virulent anti-Semite; Picasso, who was a misogynist and a thief; Hitchcock, with his fetish for blondes and a history of bullying performances out of them.

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Religion would be quite weak if a lack of fear were to compromise its power.

Our knowledge of physics allows us to rewind all the way back to when the Universe was just a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a SECOND, but before that all our known laws of physics break.

The four fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force (that holds atoms together) and the weak force (that governs radioactivity), behave completely differently and merge into one.

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Early philosophers, such as Euclid and Ptolemy, thought that our eyes themselves generated light, which then allowed us to see the world around us.

Upon hearing this logic, Heron of Alexandria declared that if that was the case then the speed of light must be infinite and instantaneous, because as we open our eyes we see the light from stars at great distances instantly.

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That’s what science is all about: admitting the things we don’t know.

Once we do that, we can make progress, whether for science, for knowledge, or for society in its entirety. Humanity as a whole progresses thanks to advancements in knowledge and in technology, with the two driving each other.

The origins of syphilis as a disease are unknown.

One theory is that it was carried to Europe by Columbus's ship crews. Many crew members later joined King Charles VIII's army in his 1495 invasion of Italy. The first recorded outbreak in Europe was in 1494–5 in Naples during this invasion.

It was called 'French disease' or 'French Pox' due to its spread by French troops.

One of the more curious of the treatments used by Largus was to use a live stingray placed on the head of the patient to treat a part of the head which is in pain.

As soon as the head goes numb the fish is removed, otherwise the head may remain numb forever.

The headache may be cured after one treatment, but he recommended that electric rays should be obtained in case treatments are needed.

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In ancient Eypt, as with Mesopotamian medicine, illness was often felt to be caused by malevolent spirits or powers.

These demons could travel on the wind and enter the victim through the mouth, nose, or a break in the skin. Treatments were aimed at ridding the body of these agents.

Appeals and prayers to the gods were part of the treatment.

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To explain the dark features on the lunar surface, which conflicted with the idea of perfection, Aristotle suggested that the Moon was contaminated by its proximity to Earth and to the corruption that existed on Earth’s surface, namely humans and other forms of life.

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As for the female protagonists, a fascinating study of an obscure Yahwist text by Professor Ilana Pardes of Hebrew University hints that Moses's wife was a de-deified version of a Venus-associated goddess.

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The idea of sending a message into space goes back to before even the advent of communications technology.

Mathematician Friedrich Gauss proposed in 1820 to create a right triangle of cleared trees in the Siberian forest that could possibly be seen by beings on another planet.

In the 1840s, astronomer Joseph Johann Littrow suggested doing something similar by lighting huge fires in trenches in the Sahara.

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The mystery of space has permeated human inquiry since we first looked up.

And being the tenacious, curious creatures we are, we explored. trough observation - recognizing movement and paterns - we calculated and sorted possibilities of what might make up the heavens that was consistent with the multitude of observations.

The questions about extraterrestrial life have been with us for all human history.

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There is also the fact that many are attracted to the idea of“hidden knowledge, ”because it serves their ego to think that they are one of the few people to understand something that others don’t know.

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Hall records that 'Tell al-Muqayyar,' ancient Ur site had become a popular destination for British soldiers, and that "every officer and man who visited Ur had gone off with one [brick] or a piece of one under his arm as a souvenir, whether for himself or for some masonic lodge in which he was interested; for . . . a brick from Ur was one of the most acceptable presents that a British Lodge could receive."

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Humanity has traditionally assigned what it does not comprehend to one of two categories: either a challenge for the future application of reason or an aspect of the divine, not subject to processes and explanations vouchsafed to our direct understanding.

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One other area in which revolutionary outcomes have consistently
disappointed their followers is women’s rights.

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Throughout most of human history, great inequality and severe poverty have been justified by religion and tradition as natural and inevitable, and have been tolerated, even accepted, as the normal order of things.

What turns poverty or inequality into a motivation for revolution?

It is the belief that only when elites and popular groups blame the regime for unjust conditions will people rise against it.

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Language and home are closely tied– the language you speak when growing up shapes your worldview. Yet of the 7, 000 languages in the world, over half may go extinct in the 21 st century. What will that do to the culture of the people who grew up in those homes and families?

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Our digital world connects us in a way that has never historically been possible while also isolating us. We are increasingly devoid of in-person interaction both socially and professionally.
Notably, there are more people living alone today, many by choice.

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The arrival of television led to a rearrangement of home and family – merging the “front” (more formal) and “back” (more domestic) spaces into open-plan living, replacing the kitchen or dining table with the “TV dinner”, spawning family fights over the remote control and children’s “screen time”.

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Magic, based on man's confidence that he can dominate nature directly, if only he knows the laws which govern it magically, is in this akin to science.
Religion, the confession of human impotence in certain matters, lifts man above the magical level, and later on maintains its independence side by side with science, to which magic has to succumb.

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Another important principle in the Tao of diet is to select foods that are fresh rather than stale, 'living' rather than 'dead', and, as far as practically possible, to consume them either raw or lightly cooked.
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P.S. After 4 months, I started reading the rest of the book.

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In those years, “you needed an official permit to even sneeze.”

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☉_☉ In both the private and public systems, students were told that not only were women and men different but that women had to obey their fathers and husbands, and could never aspire to be equal to their brothers.

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public opinion only exists in free societies; in dictatorships people have to guess the truth from propaganda, rumors, and personal deductions.

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During and after the war, the regime tried to suppress or at least control groups, movements and ideas; those it could not control, it simply banned. However, while institutions could be obliterated, collective memory could not.

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A person living in an open, democratic society would likely have difficulty understanding the symbolic power and the impact on the people of the discourses uttered by a dictator, specially the incessant repetition and insistence on the truthfulness and wisdom of his words.