http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...-cannabis/

EXCERPT: Archaeology shows that these fierce women also [...] wore trousers, smoked pot, covered their skin with tattoos, rode horses, and fought as hard as the guys. [...] The Amazons got a bum rap in antiquity. [...] Legends sprang up like weeds. They cut off their breasts to fire their bows better! They mutilated or killed their boy children! Modern (mostly male) scholars continued the confabulations. The Amazons were hard-core feminists. Man haters. Delinquent mothers. Lesbians. Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and takes us inside the truly wild and wonderful world of these ancient warrior women...

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/...erica.html

EXCERPT: [...] Richard Francaviglia, an adjunct professor of religious studies at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., argues that claims about pre-Columbian Muslims in the Americas, which have become increasingly popular since 9/11, provide a sense of ethnic pride for some contemporary Muslims. In an article in the current issue of the journal Terrae Incognitae, he writes, “The once seemingly esoteric subject of pre-Columbian Muslim exploration of the New World is now front and center in the so-called ‘Culture Wars’ of the early 21st century.” [...] Francaviglia does not dispute that Muslims could have beaten Columbus to the New World. They certainly possessed the technological expertise to have done so; but, so far, there is no reliable evidence that they did. There are, however, very good reasons for thinking that they didn't....

This is a fascinating eyewitness account of the notorious huge black triangle with lights. A whole army platoon saw this thing right above them. Sounds like the same craft witnessed by hundreds over Phoenix..

http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=22...nvironment

How about a genetics subforum? We're a bit distinct from biology itself.

Hi. Seems like a nice forum.

Now I must destroy it.

And no, not really, obviously.

http://plus.maths.org/content/bekenstein

EXCERPT: Do you remember telephone books? These great big lumbering things, often yellow, were once an indispensible part of every household. Today we don't need them anymore, as we can store several phone books' worth of information on small devices we carry around in our pockets. Those devices will also soon be outdated. And one day in the not too distant future our control of information will be complete. We will be able to encode an infinite amount of it on tiny little chips we can implant in our brains.

Except that we won't. Not because of a lack of technological know-how, but because the laws of nature don't allow it. There is only so much information you can cram into a region of space that contains a finite amount of matter. "We are talking about information in the sense of something that you can store and reproduce," explains Jacob Bekenstein, the physicist who first came up with this limit of information in the early 1980s. "[To be able to do that] you need a physical manifestation of it; it could be on paper, or it could be electronically [stored]."

Bekenstein isn't a computer scientist or engineer, but a theoretical physicist. When he came up with the Bekenstein bound, as the information limit is now known, he was thinking about a riddle posed by black holes....

http://www.spiked-online.com/review_of_b...6MWk0DN6wY

[...] It is to these great questions of culture and religion that Terry Eagleton returns in his latest collection of lectures, as he has done so often in his work for nearly half a century. Surveying the decline of religious faith, and the diverse attempts to forge ‘surrogate forms of transcendence, plugging the gap where God had once been’, he observes that ‘the Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of’.

Though as an economic system capitalism is ‘intrinsically faithless’, relying on the dull compulsion of the market, it is a ‘true believer’ in the value of traditional religion in the sphere of morality and social conduct. The problem here is not only that the advance of market forces, science, technology and education have had a corrosive effect on popular faith.

It is also the case that the distinctive ideologies of capitalism – pragmatism, materialism and utilitarianism – lack an affirmative, affective quality that might inspire the masses. Eagleton quotes the judgement of the (recently beatified) Victorian Anglo-Catholic John Henry Newman, that liberalism was ‘too cold a principle to prevail with the multitude’.

The quest for a ‘viceroy for God’ has been long and arduous. Eagleton, who likes a list, provides a long one: ‘Reason, Nature, Geist, culture, art, the sublime, the nation, the state, science, humanity, Being, Society, the Other, desire, the life force and personal relations: all of these have acted from time to time as forms of displaced divinity.’ The very survival of religion confirms the difficulty of replacing the complex role it plays in the life of human societies.

[...] He wades through an hilarious assortment of leftists, philosophers, materialists, positivists, atheists, reluctant atheists, agnostics, deists who just can’t leave religion alone: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Régis Debray, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, George Steiner, Roger Scruton, John Gray, Simon Critchley, August Comte, Edward Gibbon, Denis Diderot, JM Synge, Henrik Ibsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Matthew Arnold, Montesquieu, Hans Vaihinger, Leo Strauss, Emile Durkheim, Voltaire, John Toland. They don’t believe a word of it, of course, but, well, it might come in handy.

The philosophers turn to theology in search of more productive questioning. The social scientists can’t stop pressing religion into socially useful service – to provide the ceremonial, the ritual, the cohesion, the unity, the discipline, the order, the sweetness and light, all of which appear to have gone out of the church window. And then there’s Alain de Botton who says he finds religion ‘sporadically interesting, useful and consoling’. As Eagleton remarks, it sounds ‘rather like rustling up a soufflé when you are feeling low’....

http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/...h-feminism

EXCERPT: [...] The Americanization of Narcissism, by the historian Elizabeth Lunbeck, is a deeply researched account of the long and complicated life the concept of narcissism has had among psychoanalysts, as well as its short, oversimplified one at the hands of the social critics who in the 1970s chose to make polemical use of it. As such, this book is by way of being a corrective. Its author seeks to rescue narcissism from the distortions she feels it has been subjected to by the critics who, instead of addressing the noisy discontent of their time with sympathetic interest, sought only to castigate it, and in the process did irreparable harm to any working definition of narcissism that was ever in analytic use.

“From the beginning,” Lunbeck writes, “analysts used narcissism to account for the best and worst in us, to explain our capacities for creativity and idealism as well as for rage and cruelty, our strivings for perfection and our delight in destructiveness.” In its fullest sense, narcissism is a complicated theory of human development that, to begin with, includes a description of the healthy selfishness that an infant or a youth demonstrates in seeking to stand on its own two feet. When one matures, this infantile selfishness drops away as one becomes an independent person with a proper respect for one’s own needs as well as the needs of others. When the process goes off the rails, and there is a failure to mature, elements of primitive self-involvement linger on throughout one’s adult years. Then, if a person is dominated by infantile self-absorption, we say they have narcissistic personality disorder.

In America, in the 1970s, two eminent analysts became famous for arguing the polarizing characteristics of narcissism—on the one hand it was normal, on the other pathological—and the analyst who argued for the pathological won the day....