November 2009
28 posts
October 2009
19 posts
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WatchLSD : The Beyond Within. A documentary from the BBC in 1986 about the rise and fall of the LSD phenomenon, with some great historical footage and contemporary interviews with Albert Hoffman, Humphrey Osmond, Ken Kesey, and others involved in the social trajectoryof LSD at the time. The program places special focus on the claimed spiritual nature of the LSD experience and interviews two...
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Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down - Bozie...
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from On Etymons and Hybrids by Lewis Thomas
” An etymon is supposed to be a pure ore of a word, crystalline, absolutely original, signifying just what it was always intended to signify. They are very rare these days. Most of the words we use are hybrids, pieced together out of old, used speech by a process rather like the recycling of waste. We keep stores of discarded words around, out beyond the suburbs of our mind, stacked like...
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“We are told how in the beginning it came to pass that like cabbaging Cincinnatus...”
– from Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
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WatchDangerous Minds: Cantor, Boltzmann, Godel, Turing And The Limits Of Mathematics And Logic.
David Malone looks at the revolutionary discoveries and troubled mental lives of four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - who struggled against the accepted ideas of their time.
The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work...
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“Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was...”
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez (via kipadella)
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WatchA Rough History of Disbelief : (1) Shadows of Doubt.
Jonathan Miller presents this three part documentary series in which he takes us on a tour through the meaning and history of atheism.
Miller traces historical roots for atheism in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy which questioned beliefs about the gods - such as their supposed benevolence in a world where evil exists. Later, during...
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Georg Simmel on the Individual and the Metropolis:
” If one asks for the historical position of the two forms of individualism which are nourished by the quantitative relation of the metropolis, namely, individual independence and the elaboration of individuality itself, then the metropolis assumes an entirely new rank order in the world history of the spirit. The eighteenth century found the individual in oppressive bonds which had become...
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WatchThe Century of The Self : (1) Happiness Machines.
In this documentary series Adam Curtis explores ideas of freedom and control. He sets out a thesis that our contemporary notion of the self as a free, unique individual has been exploited (and, to a considerable extent, created) by corporate business and politicians, using the psychological theories and methods of Sigmund Freud and his heirs,...
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