Mare

Dobila iz ikeje, najtoplija preporuka. - Mare from Bookmarklet

It is a shame to see people complaining of never being able to do anything or go anywhere because they have to clean the house or walk the dog. The house can wait, and dogs do not require servants. Another example is the person so concerned about germs that it becomes impossible to travel anywhere. “I would love to go, but there are too many germs” expresses a fastidiousness that gets in the way of living a full life. While keeping in mind that some prudence in life is necessary, it is a sin to see people thwart themselves because of imagined rules and complex personal rituals. - Mare from Bookmarklet

How much of the earth can humans now access? - Mare from Bookmarklet

The revolutionary-socialist movement was not, however, some mistake, some aberrant illusion: it was at once a global movement of collective purposive action, across all continents, and a product of the structural tensions within the development of capitalism over the past two centuries. It is therefore pointless to begin a critique of it by seeing it as something that could, in its negative and positive features, have been avoided - or as, neo-liberal orthodoxy would claim, something that was just some historical illusion. True, it had its illusions; but so does the capitalist ideology which posits that everyone can become a millionaire, the newly fashionable "well-being" fantasy that the process of ageing can be halted or reversed, or the irrational belief in divine beings, and afterlives, that much of humanity still espouses and, in many societies, east and west, tries to impose on others. Moreover, like these fantasies, socialism was also an inevitability, as much as the other... more... - Mare

"Interestingly enough, Nielsen predicts that all machines intended to produce the Higgs boson will suffer from bad luck. He even asserted that “well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God” and “that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” This prediction provides an empirical way to test their claim. After all, if all machines intended to do this suffer from “bad luck” at a rate that differs in a statistically significant manner from the norm, then there would be grounds to suspect that there is some unusual causal factor at work. Of course, “bad luck” would need to be properly defined and a proper baseline would need to be set for determining what would be a statistically significant deviation." - Mare from Bookmarklet

Have you worked out what equasy is yet? It stands for Equine Addiction Syndrome, a condition characterised by gaining pleasure from horses and being prepared to countenance the consequences especially the harms from falling off/under the horse. I suspect most people will be surprised that riding is such a dangerous activity. The data are quite startling – people die and are permanently damaged from falling – with neck and spine fracture leading to permanent spinal injury (Silver and Parry, 1991; Silver 2002). Head injury is four times more common though often less obvious and is the usual cause of death. In the USA, approximately 11,500 cases of traumatic head injury a year are due to riding (Thomas, et al., 2006), and we can presume a proportionate number in the UK. Personality change, reduced motor function and even early onset Parkinson’s disease are well recognised especially in rural clinical practices where horse riding is very common. - Mare

Making riding illegal would completely prevent all these harms and would be, in practice, very easy to do – it is hard to use a horse in a clandestine manner or in the privacy of one’s own home! I suspect there would be little public or government support for such an option despite the banning of inter-species violence from equasy recently enacted in the Anti-Hunting bill. Indeed why... more... - Mare

Nutt je jako fora :) - Mare

"This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People's use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people's full personal network -- their strong and weak ties -- internet use in general, and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular, are associated with more diverse social networks." - Mare from Bookmarklet

Public spaces, such as parks, libraries and community centers, as well as "third places" highlighted by analyst Ray Oldenburg, such as cafés and restaurants, are an important source of exposure to diverse ideas, issues and opinions -- as well as meeting places for interacting with social ties.1 Contrary to concerns that internet use leads to withdrawal from public spaces we generally... more... - Mare

A university is only incidentally a market. It is more essentially a temple —a temple dedicated to knowledge and a human spirit of inquiry. It is a place where learning and scholarship are revered, not primarily for what they contribute to personal or social wellbeing but for the vision of humanity that they symbolize, sustain, and pass on. Søren Kierkegaard said that any religion that could be justified by its consequences was hardly a religion. We can say a similar thing about university education and scholarship. They only become truly worthy of their names when they are embraced as arbitrary matters of faith, not as matters of usefulness. Higher education is a vision, not a calculation. It is a commitment, not a choice. Students are not customers; they are acolytes. Teaching is not a job; it is a sacrament. Research is not an investment; it is a testament. - Mare

As Quixote’s misadventures illustrate quite vividly, following a sense of self has its own confusions and limitations, but it celebrates a nonconsequentialist view of humanity. Great enthusiasms, commitments, and actions are tied not to hopes for great outcomes but to a willingness to embrace the arbitrary and unconditional claims of a proper life. Quixote reminds us that if we trust... more... - Mare

Lijepo mantranje. - Iva

Richard Byrne takes a new biography of the man behind "WR:Mysteries of the Organism" as an opportunity to re-examine one of the most perplexing mysteries of world cinema: why the Yugoslav director, Dusan Makavejev, has not made a new film in fifteen years. Makavejev's penultimate film 'Gorilla Bathes at Noon' (released 1993) was inspired by Erich Honecker's declaration that the wall would last fifty or a hundred years, but it fell before the script was finished. "With his improvisatory skills, Makavejev fashioned a film that has only become more profound with the passage of time. ... A propelling the tale of a Russian soldier named Viktor Borisovich (Svetozar Cvetkovic), who finds himself left behind in post-wall Berlin by accident when his unit is called home to the Soviet Union. (...) In its final scene, Cvetkovic is at the Brandenburg Gate, explicitly identified as an actor, munching on an apple and hawking his uniform to tourists as a souvenir, just as many other castaway Russians... more... - Mare

Bio je u Zagrebu prošle godine, divan čovjek i sjajan umjetnik. - miroslav

"One problem is that sometimes you get into what I think of as an illegality–logic loop. This is an example of a conversation I've had many times with many people, some of them politicians: MP "You can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal one." Professor Nutt "Why not?" MP "Because one's illegal." Professor Nutt "Why is it illegal?" MP "Because it's harmful." Professor Nutt "Don't we need to compare harms to determine if it should be illegal?" MP "You can't compare harms from a legal activity with an illegal one." I have been surprised how difficult this concept is to get across to some people, whether they are politicians, fellow scientists or members of the general public." - Mare from Bookmarklet

Nije ni novak, jer nisu svi mentee novaci. - Mare

Je, ja sam jako sretna s odabirom, hvala :) - Mare

In this month's lead essay, historian Stephen Davies tackles one of the biggest of big questions: How did the world we live in -- the modern world -- so radically and rapidly diverge from the world of our pre-modern ancestors? Davies starts with a multitude of proposed explanations and winnows them down to three: the advent of empirical science and engineering, a shift in cultural attitudes toward commerce and trade, and the development of the Westphalian system of nation-states. Yet these factors emerged over a century before modernity really took off. Why the lag? Davies argues that the missing ingredient was the unique climate of competition between ruling elites in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, which combined with the other elements to produce the scientific innovation and economic growth that created the modern world. - Mare from Bookmarklet

Meni je Jared Diamond (spominju njegov model i u članku) iznimno uvjerljiv. Pitak i zabavan, ako malo razvučen, pregled njegovih ideja imaš u "National Geographic: Guns Germs & Steel" trodijelnom dokumentarcu. - Goran Zec

"How does a group of people succeed in coming together to contribute to a collective project over an extended period of time? For example, what leads a group of unemployed workers to travel to the capital to lobby for an extension of unemployment benefits, or a group of expatriate Burmese people in London to attend demonstrations against the junta? What motivations are relevant at the individual level? And what circumstances are most conducive to creating and sustaining collective action? Purely self-interested egoists won't make it -- that is the message of Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods. The maximizing egoist will reason that the activity will either succeed or fail independent of his/her own participation. If it succeeds then he will enjoy the benefits of cooperation; and if it fails he will have avoided the wasted costs of participation. Either way the egoist does better by refraining from participation. So collective action in pursuit of a public good is... more... - Mare from Bookmarklet

Previously, the distinctive mark of social democracy was the belief that it is the duty of a community to protect all its members against the powerful forces that they are unable to resist as individuals. And people’s hopes were pinned on the modern state for the carrying out of this task – a state powerful enough to force economic interests to respect the political will of the nation and the ethical principles of the national community. But nation-states are no longer sovereign in any aspects of common life on their own territory. Genuine powers – the powers that decide the range of life options and life chances available for most of our contemporaries – have evaporated from the nation-state into the global space. Politics, however, has remained local, and is no longer able to reach the powerful, let alone constrain them. We now have power freed from political supervision in the global space, and politics without power in the local space. - Mare from Bookmarklet

Social democrats need to reassert the protective power of the state – this time through global institutions." - kstefancic

Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, publics of former Iron Curtain countries generally look back approvingly at the collapse of communism. Majorities of people in most former Soviet republics and Eastern European countries endorse the emergence of multiparty systems and a free market economy. However, the initial widespread enthusiasm about these changes has dimmed in most of the countries surveyed; in some, support for democracy and capitalism has diminished markedly. In many nations, majorities or pluralities say that most people were better off under communism, and there is a widespread view that the business class and political leadership have benefited from the changes more than ordinary people. - Mare from Bookmarklet

WTF, "specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each". Dakle, skuplje su nego što bi kod nas bio precijenjeni ovogodišnji model razvikanog branda s diskovima i vrhunskom opremom. Netko je negdje pogriješio u planiranju. - Goran Zec

zasto nikad nisam bila deo nekog foruma o biciklizmu? sta ce mi to? bike je goruca tema na FF. :) sta li to govori...Ajmo, Mare, uci ces u mesecni top 10 s ovim postom. :) - Ej Dragana Dragana

"In a sense, therefore, we are back where we started. In an age when everyone must have his say, we often feel closer to the noisy demagoguery of the Roman world than to the stuffy but dignified atmosphere of the mid-20th century, when public figures were seen as genuinely honourable men and women to be treated with seriousness and respect." - Mare from Bookmarklet

Lajk lajk, ću ga pitat :) - Mare

Interesting new study out on moral behavior. The one sentence summary of the most interesting part is that people who did one good deed were less likely to do another good deed in the near future. They had, quite literally, done their good deed for the day. - Mare from Bookmarklet

Social change is the generator of temporality, in other words. It produces the beats, rhythms, cadences, sequences, pauses and so on that constitute the phenomenology of our experience of duration. For change to occur, there must be the prior multiplicity of social relations that exist in space. To accept that change inheres within time-space is therefore the powerful realization that time (and space) are produced as a consequence of social interaction, a realization which in turn has profound ramifications, as we shall see, for our conceptions of the 'timelessness' of the institutions of liberal democracy. - Mare

George Soros unveils his latest thinking on economics and politics during a lecture series hosted by the Central European University (CEU) from Oct 26-30, 2009. These lectures are the culmination of a lifetime of practical and philosophical reflection. Mr Soros discusses his general theory of reflexivity and its application to financial markets, providing insights into the recent financial crisis. The third and fourth lectures examine the concept of open society, which has guided Mr Soros’s global philanthropy, as well as the potential for conflict between capitalism and open society. The closing lecture focuses on the way ahead, closely examining the increasingly important economic and political role that China will play in the future. - Mare from Bookmarklet

"This is a self-initiated project based on the scenario – If the world were a village of 100 people" - Mare from Bookmarklet

Sweet. Although maybe representing (their) activism much more than informing about actual facts. - Mare

"U filmu ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’ web aktivist i redatelj Brett Gaylor istražuje probleme autorskih prava u informatičkom dobu koji razbijaju medijski obzor 20. stoljeća i uklanjaju zidove između korisnika i proizvođača sadržaja. Glavni je protagonist filma Girl Talk, glazbenik koji je na vrhu svih ljestvica zahvaljujući svojoj sempliranoj pjesmi. No, je li Girl Talk ideal moći običnih ljudi ili Čarobni Frulaš piratstva? U filmu su i osnivač Creative Commonsa, Lawrence Lessig, brazilski ministar kulture Gilberto Gil i kritičar pop kulture Cory Doctorow. Od prvog dana to je participativan medijski eksperiment, a Brett dijeli svoj sirovi materijal na opensourcecinema.org gdje ga svi mogu remiksirati. Metoda filma kao miksa dopušta svim remiksima da budu njegov sastavni dio." - Mare from Bookmarklet

Ja ću vjerojatno doći. - Goran Zec

"For one thing, the smartest people do not necessarily make the best political choices. William F. Buckley once famously declared that he would rather give control of our government to “the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham, recently coined the term “clever sillies” to describe people who hold wacky political views seemingly because of—rather than despite—their high intelligence. Conservative writer John Derbyshire has also observed that political naivety exists at both extremes of the IQ distribution, not just the lower one. The reason is that brilliant people can sometimes be so consumed by abstract philosophy that they forget common sense." - Mare from Bookmarklet

Jedini dobar moment u inače razočaravajućem "Everyone Says I Love You" Woody Allena je liječenje konzervativizma uspostavljanjem normalnog dotoka kisika u mozak. - Goran Zec

http://chronicle.com/article... - Mare

Ponukalo me da potražim gigapediju na wikipediji, ali nalazim samo esej Benjamina Franklina o prđenju. Ispričajte me, ali LOL - Goran Zec

"In the age of instant credit and quick profits, human life is reduced to just another commodity to be bought and sold, and the logic of short-term investments undercuts long-term investments in public welfare, young people and a democratic future. Not surprisingly, youth as a symbol of long-term commitment are now viewed as a liability rather than an asset." - Mare from Bookmarklet