Tags / 57 quotes from 34 sources
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Calvinism (wikipedia Contributors)
Calvinism set the stage for the later development of capitalism in northern europe
One school of thought attributes Calvinism with setting the stage for the later development of capitalism in northern Europe. In this view, elements of Calvinism represented a revolt against the medieval condemnation of usury and, implicitly, of profit in general.[citation…
God is infinite, and finite people are incapable of comprehending an infinite being
Reformed theologians believe that God communicates knowledge of himself to people through the Word of God. People are not able to know anything about God except through this self-revelation. Speculation about anything which God has not revealed through his Word is not…
Doctrine of predestination
Reformed theologians teach that sin so affects human nature that they are unable even to exercise faith in Christ by their own will. While people are said to retain free will in that they willfully sin, they are unable to not sin because of the corruption of their nature due to…
Can A Robot, An Insect Or God Be Aware?: Scientific American
Experimental philosophy: a new approach?
The study of consciousness (see here and here) has long played a crucial role in the discipline of philosophy, where facts about such intuitions form the basis for some complex and influential philosophical arguments. But, traditionally, the study of these intuitions has…
David Cameron's Eu Veto Largely Political - Vince Cable
Nobody should wish for the eurozone to collapse
He said: "I read and hear a lot of people breezily predicting, almost with a sense of glee, that the eurozone is going to fall apart and this country is going to drop out of the euro. "My crystal ball is no clearer than anybody else's - what I do know is that no-one should…
Durante (Andrea De Carlo)
Una piccola comunità di campagna
C’erano Jean Creuzot il francese che teneva le capre e faceva yogurt e formaggi insieme alla sua famiglia poco comunicativa, Richi e Giovanna Ceriani che insegnavano al conservatorio di Mariatico e avevano una vera fobia per ragni e scorpioni e quasi ogni altro animale non…
Gli altri non esistono
“Non sei uno che ha bisogno di programmi, Piotr” ha detto lui. “Boh” ho detto. “Non lo so più, come sono. Almeno in questo momento.” “Ma di solito?” ha detto lui. “Come ti sembra di essere?” “Quello che penso di essere” ho detto. “Ma poi ogni tanto mi capita di vedermi dal di…
Esl Podcast 729 – Being Blunt And Stubborn
Strong-willed or pigheaded?
Dirk: Well, there’s strong and there’s pigheadedness. Don’t you think? Simone: What?! You think Bruce is pigheaded, just because he doesn’t budge when other people try to sway him? I think that’s an admirable trait.
Gigaom The Dark Side Of .io: How The U.k. Is Making Web Domain Profits From A Shady Cold War Land Deal
The .io domain
The .io country code top-level domain is pretty popular right now, particularly among tech startups that want to take advantage of the snappy input/output reference and the relative availability of names — Fusion.io, Wise.io and Import.io are just a few examples. But who…
How To Be A Better Negotiator - Scientific American
Negotiation
Good negotiators should always think about how they can show the proposal they're making is fair to both parties,” Korobkin says. “Fairness” does not have one exact definition, but social psychology studies suggest that an offer people consider fair is one that is similar to…
How To Get Startup Ideas
On getting startup co-founders
This gets harder as you get older. While the space of ideas doesn't have dangerous local maxima, the space of careers does. There are fairly high walls between most of the paths people take through life, and the older you get, the higher the walls become.
Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits
Christian hypochondria
Hypochondria.—There are people who, from sympathy and anxiety for others become hypochondriacal. The resulting form of compassion is nothing else than sickness. So, also, is there a Christian hypochondria, from which those singular, religiously agitated people suffer who place…
Servility assumes the aspect of Christian virtue
Being Religious to Some Purpose.—There are certain insipid, traffic-virtuous people to whom religion is pinned like the hem of some garb of a higher humanity. These people do well to remain religious: it adorns them. All who are not versed in some professional weapon—including…
I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words Via 200 Quotes | Brain Pickings
Creativity
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve…
Improving The Human Factors Aspect Of Database Interactions.
Problems with database query languages
Two problems come to mind with this yardstick in evaluating the human factors aspect of a language: (1) Many queries that can be written with a relationally complete language are extremely difficult to compose or comprehend. Few people claim to have a thorough understanding of…
Information Anxiety 2
Information anxiety
People still have anxiety about how to assimilate a body of knowledge that is expanding by the nanosecond…. Information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand.
Ironism - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Ironist
Ironist (n. Ironism) (from Greek: eiron, eironeia), a term coined by Richard Rorty, describes someone who fulfills three conditions: She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies…
James Lovelock Reflects On Gaia's Legacy : Nature News & Comment
Safety of nuclear energy
Will nuclear energy be part of the future, despite the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan? The business with Fukushima is a joke. Well, it’s not a joke, it is very serious — how could we have been misled by anything like that? Twenty-six thousand people were killed by the…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Sprecare la vita senza accorgersene
La gente è strana:si infastidisce sempre per cose banali, e poi dei problemi gravi come il totale spreco della propria esistenza, sembra accorgersene a stento… C. Bukowski
La gente è il più grande spettacolo
La gente è il più grande spettacolo del mondo. E non si paga il biglietto.*(Charles Bukowski)
Lo specchio rotto: ritrovarsi negli altri
Chi sono? Indagare dentro per conoscere l’essere? Ritornare in se stessi per riscoprirsi? Pensare e quindi essere sicuri di esistere? Navigare all’interno per trovare la sorgente dello spirito? Ricercare il dolore purificatore? Mortificare la materia? O non sono altro, che…
Lonely Planet Iran (travel Guide)
Iranians are the most surprising people
Iranians are the most surprising people. Where you might expect them to be austere, they are charming; rather than dour, they are warm; and instead of being hostile to foreigners, they are welcoming and endlessly curious. (1002-1004)
Iranians are not Arabs
Remember that Iranians are proud of their Aryan roots, which distinguish them from the people of south Asia or the Middle East. Iranians intensely dislike being classed as Arabs, who remain unforgiven for their invasion of Iran in the 7th century. (1043-1045)
Iranians bend to the wind and spring back
Thus the Iranian way is to bend to the prevailing wind only to spring back in time with regained poise. Ever-changing fortunes have taught Iranians to be indirect people, unwilling to ever answer with a bald negative and unable to countenance rudeness or public displays of…
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule
Meetings cost programmers more
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more. (4-5)
Man Buys $27 Of Bitcoin, Forgets About Them, Finds They're Now Worth $886k | Technology | Theguardian.com
A believer's pitch for Bitcoin
Well, some people say you can still get in before the real boom. Many are predicting the bitcoin to go from 200 to 360 in the next few months and eventually end up at 100,000+ You see there is only 21 million bitcoins that can ever exist. The more people use the greater the…
Mission Statement « Liquidfeedback – Interactive Democracy
Liquid democracy and delegated votes
A representative democracy is founded on the principle of elected individuals representing the people. Usually you elect a representative (individual or party) for a fixed term – if you change your mind during the term – you can’t do much about it. Also representatives usually…
Peter Principle - Wikipedia
Peter Principle of Incompetence
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence". In other words, employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at…
Pope Francis: Gay Priests In The Vatican? Yes. A Gay Conspiracy? No | World News | The Guardian
Homosexuality in the vatican
He first dispensed with his predecessors' distaste for the very word "gay". "Who am I to judge," he said, "if someone is gay and he searches for the Lord with goodwill?" Gay people should not be marginalised from society, he said, before tackling head-on the rumoured…
Rage Against The Machine - Township Rebellion Lyrics | Songmeanings
Shackle their minds when they're bent on the cross
"Shackle their minds when they're bent on the cross When ignorance reigns, life is lost" Religious fanatics prey on the minds of those who are lost or weak. These people get brainwashed by their religion and can't see faults in what they've been taught to believe. They turn…
Rdf Primer
URIrefs make shared vocabularies possible
Using URIrefs as subjects, predicates, and objects in RDF statements supports the development and use of shared vocabularies on the Web, since people can discover and begin using vocabularies already used by others to describe things, reflecting a shared understanding of those…
Reuse existing vocabularies like Dublin Core
Even then, RDF's use of URIrefs does not solve all identification problems because, for example, people can still use different URIrefs to refer to the same thing. For this reason, it is a good idea to try to use terms from existing vocabularies (such as the Dublin Core) where…
What counts as a class in RDF Schema
RDF classes can be used to represent almost any category of thing, such as Web pages, people, document types, databases or abstract concepts. Classes are described using the RDF Schema resources rdfs:Class and rdfs:Resource, and the properties rdf:type and rdfs:subClassOf…
Vocabularies for types, properties and values
However, in addition to the basic techniques for describing things using RDF statements discussed so far, it should be clear that people or organizations also need a way to describe the vocabularies (terms) they intend to use in those statements, specifically, vocabularies for…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
News versus gossip
Didier is here. I have all the latest news and gossip for you. You know the difference between news and gossip, don’t you? News tells you what people did. Gossip tells you how much they enjoyed it.’
Thanks shown rather than said
He went out without thanking me, as was usual with the people I treated at my hut. I knew that he would invite me to dinner at his house one day soon, or bring me a gift of fruit or special incense. The people showed thanks, rather than saying it, and I’d come to accept that.
Fate shows us what we shouldn't become
Sooner or later, fate puts us together with all the people, one by one, who show us what we could, and shouldn’t, let ourselves become. Sooner or later we meet the drunkard, the waster, the betrayer, the ruthless mind, and the hate-filled heart. But fate loads the dice, of…
The purity of the slum
We came upon a group of a dozen men and a similar number of women and children gathered near the hut where I’d lived and worked for almost two years. And although I’d left the zhopadpatti, convinced that I could never live there again, it always gave me a thrill of pleasure to…
Corruption works too well
The restaurant broke the business curfew, and should’ve been closed down by the officers of the Haji Ali police post, which was only twenty metres away. But Indian pragmatism recognised that civilised people in large, modern cities needed places to gather and hunt. The owners…
Stonehenge Unveils Its £27m Makeover In Time For The Winter Solstice | Culture | The Observer
Winter solstice access at Stonehenge
"The winter solstice, which I prefer to the summer event, has always been less well attended – but that may not be the case this year, because of the visitor centre and with it falling at the weekend. It is the more significant ceremony because it coincides with our Christmas…
Summer Solstice: Thousands Descend On Stonehenge To Greet Longest Day | Culture | Guardian.co.uk
Paganism is growing in Britain
The 21st century is proving a good time to be a druid or pagan. Almost 60,000 people in England and Wales described themselves as pagan in the 2011 census.Professor Ronald Hutton, a leading expert on paganism based at Bristol University, said he believed there were at least…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
All winners need losers, all saints need sinners
Saints have always declared themselves as abject sinners—through recognition that their aspiration to be saintly is motivated by the worst of all sins, spiritual pride, the desire to admire oneself as a supreme success in the art of love and unselfishness. And beneath this lies…
Melody lives in the intervals
Many people imagine that in listening to music they hear simply a succession of tones, singly, or in clusters called chords. If that were true, as it is in the exceptional cases of tone-deaf people, they would hear no music, no melody whatsoever—only a succession of noises…
God likes to play hide-and-seek
“God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the…
Prickles versus goo
I have sometimes thought that all philosophical disputes could be reduced to an argument between the partisans of “prickles” and the partisans of “goo.” The prickly people are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise, and like to stress differences and divisions between things. They…
The Cosmic Idiot replaces God
Those who continued to believe in Someone-Up-There-Who-Cares were ridiculed as woolly-minded wishful thinkers, poor weaklings unable to face man’s grim predicament in a heartless universe where survival is the sole privilege of the tough guys. If the all-too-intelligent God was…
Why evil things?
“You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad…
Faith as allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous
Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time. This is, of course, risky because life and other people do not…
The Diggicore Project: Aggregating And Mining The World Of Open Access Articles
A contribution is a long bridge to the new
A publication has a high contribution if it creates a “long bridge” from what we knew already to something new which people will develop based on it.
Thought Of The Day - John Bell
Don't make non-believers pretend in church
I believe there is a lack of integrity and respect in asking people who do not profess any faith to pretend otherwise for forty minutes in a building which may be as alien to them as a mortuary. Humanist marriages are not - as I understand - anti religious. But they do allow a…
Villa Metaphora (Andrea De Carlo)
Frequenta i migliori e perdici le spese
La segretaria del marito al telefono ha insistito a spiegare che pagano tutto loro anche per lei, anche eventuali extra di qualsiasi genere. Quando una è una star del cinema americano di quel livello non è che ragioni come le persone normali che devono stare attente a questo e…
Il gioco delle deduzioni sugli sconosciuti
“Chi credi che siano, i tedeschi?” Di nuovo fa uno sforzo per uscire dallo stato di semi-abbandono in cui stava scivolando, riattivare almeno in parte la sua presenza. “Non lo so.” Tiziana scuote la testa, inspira i vapori solforosi della superficie. Questo è uno dei loro…
What Is Collective Intelligence? - Assembl
Factors make the difference between the emergence of collective intelligence and groupthink
It turns out three factors make the difference between the emergence of collective intelligence and groupthink: Average social perceptiveness of group members. Basically, how empathetic are the people in the group? People that score higher in this area tend to work well in…
Where Are The Semantics In The Semantic Web?
Implicit semantics are rife with ambiguity
In the simplest case, the semantics are implicit only. Meaning is conveyed based on a shared understanding derived from human consensus. A common example of this case is the typical use of XML tags, such as price, address, or delivery date. Nowhere in an XML document, or DTD or…
Why The Modern World Is Bad For Your Brain (daniel J Levitin)
Our brains are not wired to multitask well
Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think…
Information overload
Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago…
Why The Moon Landing Could Not Have Been A Hoax — It Wasn’t Technologically Possible To Fake It « The Scholarly Kitchen
Conspiracy theorists
Why does any of this matter? My concern is with the ultimate fate of knowing, of seeing the difference of what you can know and what you wish for. . . . The urge to believe drives people to trade in part of their soul in exchange for the comfort of being a rebel.