http://nerdsmagazine.com/how-to-build-a-...following/

EXCERPT: Twitter is a gigantic beast full of followers ready to retweet information they find interesting. The key is to get those people to follow your account so that you can build engagement for your business or cause. Here a few tips that will help you build your twitter following....

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...085827.htm

EXCERPT: New research concludes that Earth's infrequent but predictable path around and through our Galaxy's disc may have a direct and significant effect on geological and biological phenomena occurring on Earth. Scientists conclude that movement through dark matter may perturb the orbits of comets and lead to additional heating in the Earth's core, both of which could be connected with mass extinction events...

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-...ir-erasing

EXCERPT: Most of Earth’s mammals possess luxuriant fur. Only one seeks to remove it. Rebecca Herzig’s delightful history of hair removal in America helps explain why: smooth skin is a cultural imperative. [...] What remains is the question of whether hair removal is a form of self-enhancement or oppression. Most men feel obliged to be clean-shaven for work or polite company, and the hairy woman is roundly scorned. Of a young woman with hairy armpits and legs, one writer for the Daily Mail, the world’s most popular newspaper website, recently wrote: “Watching her I nearly parted company with my breakfast.” For human beings to make themselves different from other animals, what is normal has been rendered monstrous....

Best actress: Julianne Moore for "Still Alice"

Best actor: Michael Keaton for "Birdman"

Best movie: "Boyhood"

Best director: Richard Linkletter for "Boyhood"

"Still Alice" was riveting. You see the gradual falling away of the person inside of Alzheimer's. The emotional devastation of knowing this is your fate. The insidious loss of everything you know and love. The embarrassment. The depression. The daily panic of not even knowing your way around your own house. Was she "Still Alice" in the final scene? Her words offer a clue. "It's..about..love." she grunts. The ability to love still remains, even if it means just marveling at the beauty of the stranger before you who is your own daughter.

Philosophy is the employment of reason to investigate / understand our formal systems (intellectual products) and the active pursuits (disciplines, etc) that they either regulate or fall out of. As well as the creation / formulation of arguments, ideologies, methods, disciplines, divisions of knowledge, and their conceptual backgrounds or working presuppositions thus so requiring the recruitment of existing philosophical templates or interests. This includes the study / invention of schemes for proper thinking / reasoning themselves (philosophy's primal tools) and the meta-study of philosophy itself.

A traditional view of "knowledge passion" as consisting of only a few specialized branches (logic, epistemology, ethics, ontology, aesthetics, etc) is one subset view subsumed under the above broader conception of philosophy. The latter being more applicable to the extended diversification of the fields which philosophy investigates today and revived recognition of philosophical activity's pervasiveness in underlying any non-arbitrary "guide or system for proceeding" outputted by human thought.

http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/are-you-a...n-auid-400

EXCERPT: Mary Midgley, a moral philosopher and author, has been described as “the UK’s foremost scourge of scientific pretension”. At the venerable age of 94, she has published a new book, Are You an Illusion?, which examines contemporary approaches to the question of consciousness. As in previous books, such as Science as Salvation and The Solitary Self, Midgley seeks to challenge what she sees as the materialist dogmatism that dominates much of modern scientific thinking. [...]

What does it mean to say that science is a form of metaphysics?

MM: I take it that `science’ here means `physical science’, not just systematic thinking in general? If so, then saying that it is a "a form of metaphysics" seems to be just a mistake. The speaker’s idea is probably that `science’ on its own can supply its own conceptual background – the set of assumptions needed for its work – so that no philosophical thinking is needed here.

This can’t be true, since concepts – structural ideas such as mind and body, force, time, life and causal necessity – are not physical items.

What is involved here is not just a tribal dispute between two sets of academics. Reflection about these background assumptions is philosophical work whoever does it. The many great scientists, from Newton to Einstein, who have always dealt with philosophical questions have known this well. It is only lately that scientific training has become so one-sided that the crucial function of philosophy within it has been forgotten.

This close link between science and philosophy is not exceptional. Every discipline – history, mathematics, language, whatever – raises philosophical problems whenever the discussions within it become very general...

http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/what-scie...s-auid-317

EXCERPT: There is a view that science can ultimately explain everything, can answer every legitimate question. It is called scientism. Interestingly, most scientists consider scientism a pretty dubious doctrine. Many accept there are questions that science has not, and perhaps cannot, answer. Take moral questions, for example...

http://iainews.iai.tv/articles/who-shave...r-auid-318

EXCERPT: Our understanding of the world is underpinned by mathematics. But what if the foundations were shakier than we realised...