Why do people get vaccines? Don't they research the ingredients?

"
Boem wrote:

I call them girls for obvious reason, no self respecting educated women with knowledge of reality and the world as it is would dare dream of such a thing.


Comparing's a tricky one. The word "oppression" is strong, and instinctively I agree with you that it trivialises what some people go through - torture, death, horrific acts - for others with no such prospects to use it. I don't use the word oppressed (unless I'm joking), when another such as "inequitable" would do.

Yet, if people in privileged, freer societies compare and think we're doing so much better, we run the risk of disconnecting from a shared movement, of othering, and we invalidate what can be very real struggle within that 2%.

I see it a lot in mental health, where people in the presence of others with some really big stories say they can't really speak about struggle, or stigma, because they haven't been admitted involuntarily, have only had three admissions, have "just" had an eating disorder, or anxiety, haven't actually tried to kill themselves, are white, have a job, are male, whatever.

It's so fragmented and fundamentally not reflective of people's experiences. If it hurts, it hurts. Thinking you're a special snowflake sook for your own experiences is exactly what doubting keep silent bullshit a conspiracy would put there if there was one. If your pain can help you empathise with another, without saying you get exactly what they are going through that works both ways - you feel validated and they feel less isolated in their extremity. Then shit can get done to change things.

I think we have to guard against complacency. The Handmaid's Tale is an incredible reminder of that.

"
Boem wrote:


Ta, I might have a look. Possibly not, who knows

"
Boem wrote:
...
Those kids and the parents that put faith in the system, well i'm not overjoyed by that.

Thank god people are strong and adaptive ? I hope they can look back at themselves in like 20 years going all no-platform mode or protesting some random stuff and shake their heads while turning red.

Peace,

-Boem-


Yes, to take it wider, OMG the unfact movement is really mind-boggling.

A well meaning math teacher finds herself trumped by a post-fact America.

^ Was on another board I visit, recently.

Seriously, that we can laugh at this. "Trumped", because she has a win at the end.



Last edited by erdelyii on Apr 6, 2019, 12:24:21 AM
You really can see an owl’s eyes through its ears

I was reading about Athena, and looking at owl eye pictures led me to the above.

"
My personal favorite personality trait of Athena is her pitilessness.

Homer calls her “Heaven’s daughter, whose spear levels battalions of heroes in her wrath.” She bears the aegis, which strikes primordial terror into the hearts of her victims.

She is glaukopis, a title that evokes the flashing of her eyes, the color of steel but with the shine of light on the sea or the glare of an owl. If you’ve never been to a raptor center and gotten a chance to lock eyes with an owl, I encourage you to do so. It is an enlightening experience for purposes of understanding Athena.

An owl can look at you and make you feel like you only haven’t been eaten yet because it hasn’t figured out how to fit you in its stomach. The goddess has no such limitation. Athena Glaukopis is not someone whose eyes you want to meet.

It hurts my heart when people only remember Heaven’s Daughter as the goddess of crafts and wisdom and strategy. She is all those things, but she is also someone with the sheer pitiless power to make you wish you’d never, ever fucked with her.
-Eric Lowe


While Odysseus got the helpful like-minded ally, Medusa knew the pitiless power of Athena's anger all too well. That energy is something I think most of us can admire and some of us evoke, if it's what is called for. Good to reflect on when it might be called for, and how to judge that timing and wisely make it effective and in proportion. Also, important to show proper respect for it in others, how to do that, yes.

And to think on what kind of person draws her keen attention. Lots there, too.

The beauty of a pantheon; such a rich cast of characters and aspects to story and muse on. The gods were well-designed to embody fairly discrete aspects. Us humans are so much more complicated, but then who would want it any other way?










You can do what you want erd, but i'm not for "relativism" when it comes to suffering.

Maybe when we fixed those fundamental law and state institutionalized forms of it we can go and arbitrarely go over everybody's suffering.

Reading some parts of your text makes me wonder "you realize we all suffer right?", some just get on with it despite the odds and others do not.
I'm really not a fan of shining a light on the victim in a situation because my experience has thought me, anything you feed time or attention grows.

I think your intentions are in the right place, but intentions don't justify an outcome.(i don't think i need to bring up historical cases where people did the most atrocious things with "intentions" to justify them)

I view it as "a waste of resources and time" to pitty those 2%, when we obviously still have work to do on a global scale for massive numbers of women not in that wealth plateau.

I think we can both agree that "if" misogyny exist's, and i am prepared to agree to that claim though i have doubts about the volume of it in a western based wealthy culture, it will be far more punishing under a poor citizenship then a wealthy one.

Instituted misogyny i refuse entirely, since the actual data says the systems already disproportionally favor women. One might bring up the notion that men are actually being discriminated against in current college institutions.(overcorrection)
Or one could bring up the divorce system and children and how it favors the mother disproportionately in verdicts.

Systems already had a favor, which tilts further when society actually reached equalizing value's.

We can see this in text's like the human rights charter where women and children have their own clausule but men are entirely neglected or not even mentioned.(obviously reflecting society as a whole that we favor women and children above all else in the western culture)

Leaving all that asside, let's give a little bit of tribute to Athena which she surely deserves. Isn't it amazing, the utility of "gods" even for atheist and agnostic people, they hold so many realizations and thoughts within them.

Athena is a goddess one could both mourn or exalt because she is a classical symbol of intellectual aesthetics.
The spear a symbol of precision and extension in warfare
The aegis a shield providing everlasting security in an advance
The owl an animal known for it's precission and accuracy even in the most darkest of suroundings

One could pose the notion that her sight was so divine that she could see the beauty in all because of those tools.(piercing the surface, rendering mud and darkness ineffective layers of protection)

But sight is only sight and it does not bring into existence for that communion is required, so she can also be mourned because only she posseses this sight.

Just like a painter has a vision and tries to reach his audiance with the best of his capability's but never actually attains communion.
They clearly have a piercing sight, but what sight others can only guess.

Athena would consume every inch of you with sight, but i disagree with the final point of the text you posted.

I don't think any person falling in the gaze of Athena would wish to remove himself from that sight, fear it or attempt an escape.

Just like prey under hypnosis remains still and calm, seduced by sight.

She is the huntress of beauty and one would be satisfied with the realization you are her prey and she is after the most beautifull of all things.
She exalts the moment she locks eyes.
She will never be exalted herself in a simmilar fashion, thought i gave it a go.

Peace,

-Boem-
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
Last edited by Boem on Apr 6, 2019, 2:17:07 PM
owl eyeball through ear sure got me.

Anyway, can't address your post, Boem, without writing an essay. Rather than do that, I'll focus on this -

"
Boem wrote:
Reading some parts of your text makes me wonder "you realize we all suffer right?", some just get on with it despite the odds and others do not.
I'm really not a fan of shining a light on the victim in a situation because my experience has thought me, anything you feed time or attention grows.


I'm a fan of working with people to change those narratives, mine included.

I'll then simply say that it's great you've got some strong and sound opinions on these big topics, and I hope you take them somewhere practical. Oppressed women need all the support they can get.

"
Boem wrote:
Leaving all that asside, let's give a little bit of tribute to Athena which she surely deserves. Isn't it amazing, the utility of "gods" even for atheist and agnostic people, they hold so many realizations and thoughts within them.

Athena is a goddess one could both mourn or exalt because she is a classical symbol of intellectual aesthetics.
The spear a symbol of precision and extension in warfare
The aegis a shield providing everlasting security in an advance
The owl an animal known for it's precission and accuracy even in the most darkest of suroundings

One could pose the notion that her sight was so divine that she could see the beauty in all because of those tools.(piercing the surface, rendering mud and darkness ineffective layers of protection)

But sight is only sight and it does not bring into existence for that communion is required, so she can also be mourned because only she posseses this sight.

Just like a painter has a vision and tries to reach his audiance with the best of his capability's but never actually attains communion.
They clearly have a piercing sight, but what sight others can only guess.

Athena would consume every inch of you with sight, but i disagree with the final point of the text you posted.

I don't think any person falling in the gaze of Athena would wish to remove himself from that sight, fear it or attempt an escape.

Just like prey under hypnosis remains still and calm, seduced by sight.

She is the huntress of beauty and one would be satisfied with the realization you are her prey and she is after the most beautifull of all things.
She exalts the moment she locks eyes.
She will never be exalted herself in a simmilar fashion, thought i gave it a go.

Peace,

-Boem-


Yes, she's awe-inspiring.

Agree about the realizations and thoughts, even as an atheist.

The text doesn't say the person would wish to remove themselves from her sight. It says you wouldn't want to meet that pitiless gaze.

It says,
She is all those things, but she is also someone with the sheer pitiless power to make you wish you’d never, ever fucked with her.

"
When Athena saw what Arachne had woven, she was even more angry than she had been before. Even though Arachne’s weaving was better, Athena didn’t care.

She pointed her finger at Arachne and suddenly Arachne’s nose and ears shrank up, her hair all fell out, her arms and legs got long and skinny, and her whole body shrank until she was just a little tiny spider.

“You want to spin,” cried Athena, “go ahead and spin!”


"
"Nonsense," said* Athena "One day beauty will fade away. But I will make it fade away now and all your loveliness will be gone forever."

When Athena uttered those words Medusa turned into a terrible monster. Her hair thickened into hissing snakes and body turned into a snake.

"Are you happy for what I have done? Now anyone who looks in your eyes will now turn into stone and no one will be able to save them," snapped Athena,"Even you, Medusa, should you seek your reflection, will turn to rock the moment you see your face."

Athena then sent Medusa with her hair of snakes to live with the blind monsters, the gorgon sisters, at the end of the earth, so that no innocent people would be turned to stone at the sight of her by accident.


(*originally said screamed but that seems wrong).

"
Boem wrote:
She is the huntress of beauty and one would be satisfied with the realization you are her prey and she is after the most beautifull of all things.
She exalts the moment she locks eyes.


Compelling as that experience sounds, can't find any tales of her hypnotizing men; after all she was a virgin goddess.



Greenland shark may live 400 years, smashing longevity record

"
...marine biologist John Steffensen at the University of Copenhagen collected a piece of backbone from a Greenland shark captured in the North Atlantic, hoping it would have growth rings he could count to age the animal. He found none, so he consulted Jan Heinemeier, an expert in radiocarbon dating at Aarhus University in Denmark. Heinemeier suggested using the shark’s eye lenses instead. His aim was not to count growth rings, but instead to measure the various forms of carbon in the lenses, which can give clues to an animal’s age.

Then came the hard part. Steffensen and his graduate student Julius Nielsen spent several years collecting dead Greenland sharks, most of them accidently ensnared in trawling nets used to catch other types of fish. After that, they employed an unusual technique: They looked for high amounts of carbon-14, a heavy isotope left behind by nuclear bomb testing in the mid-1950s. Extra carbon from the resulting “bomb pulse” had infiltrated ocean ecosystems by the early 1960s, meaning that inert body parts formed during this time—in particular eye lenses—also have more of the heavy element. Using this technique, the researchers concluded that two of their sharks—both less than 2.2 meters long—were born after the 1960s. One other small shark was born right around 1963.

The team used these well-dated sharks as starting points for a growth curve that could estimate the ages of the other sharks based on their sizes. To do this, they started with the fact that newborn Greenland sharks are 42 centimeters long. They also relied on a technique researchers have long used to calculate the ages of sediments—say in an archaeological dig—based on both their radiocarbon dates and how far below the surface they happen to be. In this case, researchers correlated radiocarbon dates with shark length to calculate the age of their sharks. The oldest was 392 plus or minus 120 years, they report today in Science. That makes Greenland sharks the longest lived vertebrates on record by a huge margin; the next oldest is the bowhead whale, at 211 years old. And given the size of most pregnant females—close to 4 meters—they are at least 150 years old before they have young, the group estimates.

Oellermann is impressed not only with how old the sharks are, but also how Nielsen and his colleagues figured out their ages. “Who would have expected that nuclear bombs [one day] could help to determine the life span of marine sharks?” he asks.

He and others think cold water helps lengthen the animals’ lives by slowing down their growth and biochemical activity. “Lower metabolic rate plays a big role," agrees Shawn Xu, a geneticist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “But that’s not the whole story.” Three years ago, his work in nematodes showed that cold can also activate antiaging genes that help an animal better fold proteins, get rid of DNA-damaging molecules, and even fight off infections more effectively, extending life span. The cold-activated molecules “are evolutionarily conserved” across the animal kingdom, and thus these pathways very likely exist in these sharks, too, he predicts.








^I said she hunts for beauty, i don't make any mention of men :p

Maybe you just internalized that in my voice, can't say i would mind being hypnotized by Athena and by proxy of art i might contemplate if i have not already experienced a fraction of what such a gaze would invoke.

She as a virgin is actually something i hadn't considered but seems to fall in line with my notion of her being unable to form communion with others.

She's a sorceress!(was gonna type wizard but stopped myself just in time, self censorship is a bitch!)

:-D

That's one ugly shark man. Not surprising for his age though, that dating technique is interesting and sort of comical.
What are the odds of looking back on a nuke and go, well that served a good purpose.

Makes one wonder what we will be looking back at in fifty years time while shaking our heads going either "why oh why" or "thank heavens for that".

I was reading animal farm last week and i am doing gulag archipelago this week, putting the political stuff asside, one element that is highly noticeable is how fragile humans interact with time as an active factor in life.
It's like the paper of a painting, nobody sees it but it's obviously always present doing its thing.

As an aside note, probably one of the reasons why our culture handles "death" so poorly in general.
Imagine how you would treat people if you where constantly actively aware of how limited time actually is.
That talk with your parents, a friendly smile to a guy in your street, that girl passing you by on a bike offering a smile and wave etc
The ineptitude of wasting it on trouble.

For me it seems like a great source of joy if contemplated and realized propperly.
Spoiler
no science stuff from me today, watching a talk and just wanted to respond before going to sleep, some random ravings on time and death will have to suffice!


Peace,

-Boem-
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
"
Boem wrote:
^I said she hunts for beauty, i don't make any mention of men :p

Maybe you just internalized that in my voice, can't say i would mind being hypnotized by Athena and by proxy of art i might contemplate if i have not already experienced a fraction of what such a gaze would invoke.

She as a virgin is actually something i hadn't considered but seems to fall in line with my notion of her being unable to form communion with others.

She's a sorceress!(was gonna type wizard but stopped myself just in time, self censorship is a bitch!)

:-D


Nah, I just pictured what you seemed to be talking about. See, you don't mind the idea!

Unable's an interesting one. It seems to be more a choice.

Hecate's the witchy one.

"
Boem wrote:
That's one ugly shark man. Not surprising for his age though, that dating technique is interesting and sort of comical.
What are the odds of looking back on a nuke and go, well that served a good purpose.

Makes one wonder what we will be looking back at in fifty years time while shaking our heads going either "why oh why" or "thank heavens for that".

I was reading animal farm last week and i am doing gulag archipelago this week, putting the political stuff asside, one element that is highly noticeable is how fragile humans interact with time as an active factor in life.
It's like the paper of a painting, nobody sees it but it's obviously always present doing its thing.

As an aside note, probably one of the reasons why our culture handles "death" so poorly in general.
Imagine how you would treat people if you where constantly actively aware of how limited time actually is.
That talk with your parents, a friendly smile to a guy in your street, that girl passing you by on a bike offering a smile and wave etc
The ineptitude of wasting it on trouble.

For me it seems like a great source of joy if contemplated and realized propperly.
Spoiler
no science stuff from me today, watching a talk and just wanted to respond before going to sleep, some random ravings on time and death will have to suffice!


Peace,

-Boem-


The shark's beautiful. So beat-up, no wonder with all the years.

Your comments and the shark make me think of the long - lived races in Tolkien. Fortunately, someone, Anna Mathie has written a lovely piece on it, which I just found typing long-lived races Tolkien, looking for a passage or two.

She's writing with active Christian faith, on a Christian blog. Hopefully you won't mind that too much.

"
When I started reading The Lord of the Rings as an undergraduate, I was half-embarrassed to be doing so. I might become one of those girls who left each other messages on the dorm message board in elvish runes and stayed up late discussing the geography of Middle Earth in fake English accents. Even after I had overcome my snobbery and discovered the book’s magnificence, literary pretensions still kept me away from the appendices: Detailed explanations of invented anthropology and linguistics—what could they be but the self-indulgent folly of an otherwise great writer? But when chance or boredom finally led me to leaf through them one day, I came upon what I still find the most exquisitely sorrowful moment in a book filled with exquisitely beautiful sorrow.

The wise and good Arwen, who has given up her elvish immortality to be the mortal Aragorn’s queen, is overcome at his deathbed and pleads for him to stay with her longer. He refuses, saying that it is right for him to go with good grace and before he grows feeble. Then he tells her:

I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men.
Arwen replies that she has no choice:

I must indeed abide the Doom of Men whether I will or nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Numenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Elves say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive.
In this new and bitter knowledge, she goes away alone after Aragorn’s death, “the light of her eyes . . . quenched . . . cold and gray as nightfall that comes without a star.”
She dies alone in the dead land of Lorien, where deathless Elves once lived.

For Arwen, otherwise infinitely wiser than we, death is the one unknown, a new and unexpected discovery. Aragorn knows better; he knows, as all mortals should, that comfort is impossible and even unworthy in the face of death. Yet he still holds fast to what Arwen has only known as an abstract theological tenet: that death is truly God’s gift.

I cry whenever I reread this passage; it haunts me like no other, though it’s hard to explain why. At the heart of it is the phrase “the gift of the One to Men.” Tolkien looks unblinkingly at “the loss and the silence” of death, but remains steadfast: Death is our curse, but also our blessing.

He has hidden this particular tale away in an appendix, but the same idea of mortality permeates the whole book. The plot centers on a ring that gives immortality and corrupts its bearer. Much of the book’s character interest arises from the interactions between mortal and immortal races, who both mystify and fascinate each other. The structure of the work also echoes mortality itself. I have heard friends criticize the long and leisurely denouement (over a hundred pages), but I’ve never understood such complaints. Myself, I was grateful for every page, always vividly aware that they would run out all too soon. Those closing chapters are a portrait of mortality: However happily a story ends, it must end, and that itself is our great sorrow. All that is beautiful and beloved dies. The Fellowship of the Ring accomplishes its quest, but with the end of its troubles comes the separation of its members. Gandalf and the High Elves win the war, but their own victory banishes them from Middle Earth. With them “many fair things will fade and be forgotten.” Frodo has saved the world but now longs to leave it. This has to be one of literature’s saddest happy endings. Tolkien makes us savor the bittersweet, for he knows (like Gandalf) that “not all tears are an evil.”

Clearly, mortality is at the heart of this story. The subject has become a hot topic today, with Leon Kass and other “mortalists” arguing against a research culture that sees death and aging merely as foes to be overcome. If medicine succeeds in making man immortal, or even much longer-lived, the mortalists argue, much that makes human life worthwhile will be lost. Kass has used the wisdom of such ancient authors as Homer to illustrate his vision of mortality’s benefits. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien makes a Christian case for the same claim. In Tolkien’s world, immortality and long life lead even the noblest creatures to a spiritual dead end, or to outright corruption.

The virtues of mortality are most obvious in the great paradox of the book: that the very mortal Hobbits are the only ones who can resist the Ring’s seduction and destroy it. Seemingly the most insignificant and lowliest race of all, they spend their (relatively) short lives in small pursuits. They have little use for lofty “elvish” ideas. As most characters in The Lord of the Rings remark, they are unlikely saviors of the world. In fact, their lowly mortality may be their greatest asset...


Read on here - Tolkien and the Gift of Mortality.




"
Astronomers say a major announcement is on the way based on findings from the international Event Horizon Telescope project, which experts believe could be the first-ever photographs to show the surroundings of a black hole. On Wednesday, April 10, the Event Horizon Telescope team will be holding multiple press conferences around the world to announce a "groundbreaking result" in their study of black hole environments.


Hype.

"
A GOLF BALL ON THE MOON

At its centre, the mass of a black hole is compressed into a single, zero-dimensional point.

The distance between this so-called “singularity” and the event horizon is the radius, or half the width, of a black hole.

The EHT that collected the data for the first-ever image is unlike any ever devised.

“Instead of constructing a giant telescope — which would collapse under its own weight — we combined several observatories as if they were fragments of a giant mirror,” Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the Institute for Millimetric Radio Astronomy in Grenoble, told AFP.

In April 2017, eight such radio telescopes scattered across the globe — in Hawaii, Arizona, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and the South Pole — were trained on two black holes in very different corners of the Universe to collect data.

Studies that could be unveiled this week are likely to zoom in on one or the other.

Oddsmakers favour Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own elliptical galaxy that first caught the eye of astronomers.

MORE: Hype builds around supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*

Sag A* has four million times the mass of our sun, which means that the black hole is generates is about 44 million kilometres across.

That may sound like a big target, but for the telescope array on Earth some 26,000 light-years (or 245 trillion kilometres) away, it’s like trying to photograph a golf ball on the Moon.


Will share images, and possibly attendent memes when wits invariably photoshop apt people/things onto it.



That sounds amazing, cheers something to look forward to.

I had seen some recent trends of people asking around for black-holes, now i know why :p

inb4 meme's with kekistan flags planted in the centre of the black-hole.

\o/

Peace,

-Boem-
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
"
Boem wrote:
That sounds amazing, cheers something to look forward to.

I had seen some recent trends of people asking around for black-holes, now i know why :p

inb4 meme's with kekistan flags planted in the centre of the black-hole.

\o/

Peace,

-Boem-


Yep, it's been in the news the last few days. Kekistan? haha, something like that. Staying tuned.












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