maitani

maitani imported maitani's feed
Memories of errors foster faster learning -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Using a deceptively simple set of experiments, researchers have learned why people learn an identical or similar task faster the second, third and subsequent time around. The reason: They are aided not only by memories of how to perform the task, but also by memories of the errors made the first time." - maitani - -

4 other comments...

"The surprise finding in the current study, described in Science Express on Aug. 14, is that not only do such errors train the brain to better perform a specific task, but they also teach it how to learn faster from errors, even when those errors are encountered in a completely different task. In this way, the brain can generalize from one task to another by keeping a memory of the errors." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
BBC News - Why is Sanskrit so controversial? - http://www.bbc.com/news...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Inside a brightly lit classroom at Delhi's Laxman Public school, a group of students sing a Sanskrit hymn. Across the corridor, in another classroom, a group of grade eight students are being taught Vedic Mathematics, which dates back to a time in ancient India when Sanskrit was the main language used by scholars. It is all part of Sanskrit week - a celebration of the classical language across hundreds of schools mandated by India's new federal right-wing government. "It's our mother language, the root of all our languages," says Usha Ram, the school principal." - maitani - -

5 other comments...

Northern language group moves against Southern? They're just appropriating medieval French culture! - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
IS THERE SOMETHING ABOUT ISLAM? | Pandaemonium - http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"My response is to say: ‘Yes, that’s true. But it is true also of believers.’ I point out to my students that in the Bible, Leviticus sanctifies slavery. It tells us that adulterers ‘shall be put to death’. According to Exodus, ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. And so on. Few modern day Christians would accept norms. Others they would. In other words, they pick and choose." - maitani - -

3 other comments...

And it is on such an important issue. I want to ask everyone of my acquaintances who are self-appointed critics of Islam and Quran to read it. Islamophobia is strong in Germany. - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
EM Forster: 'But for Masood, I might never have gone to India' | Books | The Guardian - http://www.theguardian.com/books...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

Related: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/wEA7S"&... ; - maitani - -

1 other comments...

"It took EM Forster 11 years to write A Passage to India – what made his progress so slow? Damon Galgut explores the repression and unreciprocated love that influenced the author's most celebrated work" - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Expecting to teach enhances learning, recall -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

bu iyi - maitani - -

2 other comments...

"People learn better and recall more when given the impression that they will soon have to teach newly acquired material to someone else, suggests new research. Findings of the study suggest that simply telling learners that they would later teach another student changes their mindset enough so that they engage in more effective approaches to learning than did their peers who simply expected a test." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
What Would Krishna Do? Or Shiva? Or Vishnu? - NYTimes.com - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014...&

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"This is the ninth in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Jonardon Ganeri, currently a visiting professor of philosophy at New York University Abu Dhabi and the author of “The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700.”" - maitani - -

maitani imported maitani's feed
Neolithic dairy farming at the extreme of agriculture in northern Europe - http://rspb.royalsocietypublis...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

Full text link: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rspb.royalsocietyp... ; title="http://rspb.royalsocietyp... ; - maitani - -

"Abstract: The conventional ‘Neolithic package’ comprised animals and plants originally domesticated in the Near East. As farming spread on a generally northwest trajectory across Europe, early pastoralists would have been faced with the challenge of making farming viable in regions in which the organisms were poorly adapted to providing optimal yields or even surviving. Hence, it has long been debated whether Neolithic economies were ever established at the modern limits of agriculture. Here, we examine food residues in pottery, testing a hypothesis that Neolithic farming was practiced beyond the 60th parallel north. Our findings, based on diagnostic biomarker lipids and δ13C values of preserved fatty acids, reveal a transition at ca 2500 BC from the exploitation of aquatic organisms to processing of ruminant products, specifically milk, confirming farming was practiced at high latitudes. Combining this with genetic, environmental and archaeological information, we demonstrate the origins of dairying probably accompanied an incoming, genetically distinct, population successfully establishing this new subsistence ‘package’." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Phlox

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

w o w! - maitani - -

:-)) - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Phlox, Engelstrompete, Fetthenne und Stockrose

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

Thank you, Malik.That roof garden is my little hobby. :-) - maitani - -

Like! - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Can a word really be untranslatable? | OxfordWords blog - http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"When we say that a word is untranslatable, we tend to mean that it lacks an exact or word-for-word equivalent in our own language. In our desire to make everyone and everything understood, we sometimes forget that languages are living, writhing beasts: they evolve and mutate at such a rate that their genetic make-up is by nature very different, and it is almost impossible to pin them down. Although we can spot many commonalities between languages (just ask a friendly polyglot), there are also countless words that resist comparison. We are attracted to these outliers because they seem to fill the gaps in our own language and – if they originate from lands that are unfamiliar to us – they appear to unlock the secrets of other, distant cultures." - maitani - -

1 other comments...

"There’s no such thing as an untranslatable word. There, I’ve said it. Despite all the memes, blogs, and books to the contrary, all language is inherently translatable. However, whether the broader meaning of a text – the jokes, philosophies, and cultural peculiarities of its language – is translatable depends almost entirely on the individual with their nose in the dictionary (not to mention the dictionary itself)." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
AS IF STILL BURNING | Pandaemonium - http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"This week marked the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War. Today marks the anniversary of an even more grotesque event – the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. Three days later the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. These remain the only use of nuclear weapons in warfare." - maitani - -

"Some 12 km² of Hiroshima were destroyed, as were around 69% of the city’s buildings. The images above, which were taken by the US military on the day, show Hiroshima before and after the bombing. Some 66,000 people are thought to have died in Hiroshima on the day; probably a similar number again died over the next four months as a result of their injuries or from radiation sickness. So fierce was the heat that people were vaporised but their shadows left upon the walls." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
The Language of Food: Tea if by Sea - http://languageoffood.blogspot.de/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"We drink a lot of tea in San Francisco—I guess you should expect no less for a city originally named Yerba Buena, after a local wild herb in the mint family (Satureja douglasii, shown to the right) used as an herbal tea." - maitani - -

"One local tradition is yum cha, 'drink tea' in Cantonese, the Chinese name for a mid-morning spent lingering over pots of tea with friends or family. Yum cha is invariably accompanied by dim sum: steamed shrimp dumplings, Malaysian-style steamed spice cakes, braised tofu skins stuffed with vegetables, pork siumai dumplings topped with fish roe. But the tea is what defines the ritual: bright chrysanthemum, elegant Iron Goddess of Mercy, or the most classic San Francisco yum cha tea: dark earthy bo lei (pu'er in Mandarin). Bo lei is from the subtropical hills of Yunnan just on the border with Myanmar, and unlike green or black teas, is fermented microbially as it ages." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Why metaphor matters | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Plato famously said that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. But with respect to one aspect of poetry, namely metaphor, many contemporary philosophers have made peace with the poets. In their view, we need metaphor. Without it, many truths would be inexpressible and unknowable. For example, we cannot describe feelings and sensations adequately without it. Take Gerard Manley Hopkins’s exceptionally powerful metaphor of despair: selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, thoughts against thoughts in groans grind." - maitani - -

1 other comments...

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://books.google.com.t... ; title="http://books.google.com.t... ; - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Eurozine - Do not trust economists! - Lukasz Pawlowski, Tomás Sedlácek, Marcin Serafin - http://www.eurozine.com/article...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Treat economists like any religious minority, says Tomas Sedlacek. Grant them the right to say whatever they believe and the right to gather. But always be sceptical of the stories they tell. Just take the invisible hand of the market: it's plain wishful thinking, like a prayer." - maitani - -

Fascinating! - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
A Calendar Page for August 2014 - Medieval manuscripts blog - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Agricultural labours continue in these two calendar pages for the month of August. On the first folio, among a scatter border of flowers and insects, we see a roundel of two peasants, inside a barn. They are at work threshing the wheat that was harvested in July, while, through the window behind them, we can see a few birds circling. On the facing folio, a barefoot peasant is shaking a shallow basket, literally separating the wheat from the chaff. Above him is a seated woman with a palm for the zodiac sign Virgo." - maitani - -

maitani imported maitani's feed
BBC Nature - Dinosaurs 'shrank' regularly to become birds - http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"Huge meat-eating, land-living dinosaurs evolved into birds by constantly shrinking for over 50 million years, scientists have revealed." - maitani - -

1 other comments...

"Theropods shrunk 12 times from 163kg (25st 9lb) to 0.8kg (1.8lb), before becoming modern birds." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Wine cup of Pericles found - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

""The name Ariphron is extremely rare," Angelos Matthaiou, secretary of the Greek Epigraphic Society, told the newspaper." - maitani - -

"Experts are "99 per cent" sure that the cup was used by the Athenian statesman, as one of the other names listed, Ariphron, is that of Pericles' elder brother." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
The Smart Set: As the World Burned - July 25, 2014 - http://www.thesmartset.com/article...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 is a document of one man’s attempt to repaint his broken landscape. It is remarkable how quickly his world was lost. In hindsight, we think of the First World War as a four-year affair. We forget, though, that Austria-Hungary lost half of its men within the first two weeks of the war — 400,000 men, including 100,000 who were taken prisoner by the Russians. At the war’s start, the grand Austro-Hungarian soldier, with his long ridiculous sword, was often killed or maimed within days of reaching the battlefield. The injured and insane were sent home to wander their cities like ghosts, to parade before the horrified eyes of their neighbors. And the war kept going on." - maitani - -

maitani imported maitani's feed
The Barefoot Bum: Does epistemology matter? - http://barefootbum.blogspot.de/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"A number of articles recently assert that the epistemology of religion doesn't matter; what matters are the practices. (The latest of course, being Religion, Heuristics, and Intergenerational Risk Management, with my response.) And it is asserted that epistemology doesn't matter in a deep way: even if we know that the underlying structure of a set of practices is false, even in the "worst" sense of falsity, that doesn't matter. I find this position deeply problematic." - maitani - -

maitani imported maitani's feed
Amphitrite’s Brood: Sea-Monsters in the Classical World | res gerendae - http://resgerendae.wordpress.com/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"[δείδω μή] …τί μοι καὶ κῆτος ἐπισσεύῃ μέγα δαίμων ἐξ ἁλός, οἷά τε πολλὰ τρέφει κλυτὸς Ἀμφιτρίτη: [I’m afraid] that some god’s going to send a great sea-monster against me; glorious Amphitrite breeds them in numbers." - maitani - -

"Culturally as well as geographically, the sea was central to the Classical world. These days we’re encouraged to think of the Mediterranean as something that united rather than divided the region, teeming with shipping and movement. All of this is true, but sea-faring was also deeply perilous,[1] especially in the autumn and winter. Shipwrecks and deaths at sea were common. It’s no surprise, then, that ancient Mediterranean waters were believed to be home to all manner of monstrous and deadly creatures." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Fwd: Deaths in the Iliad: a Classics Infographic http://nblo.gs/YKDuS (via Demetrios the Traveller http://friendfeed.com/brexian...)

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://greekmythcomix.wor... ; title="http://greekmythcomix.wor... ; - maitani - -

1 other comments...

Bad Ass :-)) - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
BBC News - The most important battle you've probably never heard of - http://www.bbc.com/news...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

Hah, weren't Maldon and Hastings also defeats? - maitani - -

6 other comments...

Bouvines and Muret- two 'obscure' battles with huge impace. Imperial loss at Bouvines as crucial as English; northern French victory at Muret also key in shaping France and thus Europe - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
The Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Mathematical Texts - The Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Mathematical Texts - http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dccmt...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"While the vast majority of cuneiform tablets contain numerical data, written by professional scribes, a smaller number are the outcome of teaching, learning, or communicating mathematical techniques or ideas as part of scribal education. This website presents transliterations and translations of around a thousand published cuneiform mathematical tablets; a similar number await decipherment and analysis in museums around the world." - maitani - -

"Cuneiform writing was invented some 5000 years ago in southern Iraq for the purpose of keeping accounts - and for the next few hundred years book-keeping remained its sole use. The last datable cuneiform tablet, also from southern Iraq, is an astronomical diary for the year 75 CE. For the three millennia spanning the rise and fall of cuneiform writing, and arguably for some time after, numeracy was an inseparable and essential part of literate culture throughout the Middle East." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
All You Need To Know About the 10% Brain Myth, in 60 Seconds | Science Blogs | WIRED - http://www.wired.com/2014...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"As it happens, I’ve written a book all about brain myths (Great Myths of the Brain; due out this November). I thought I’d use what I learned to give you a 60-second explainer on the 10 percent myth." - maitani - -

"The new Luc Besson movie Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson, opens in theatres countrywide tomorrow. It’s based on the immortal myth that we use only 10 percent of our brains. Johansson’s character is injected with drugs that allow her to access 100 percent of her brain capacity. She subsequently gains the ability to learn Chinese in an instant, beat up bad guys, and throw cars with her mind (among other new talents). Morgan Freeman plays neuroscientist Professor Norman, who’s built his career around the 10 percent claim. “It is estimated most human beings use only 10 percent of the brain’s capacity,” he says, “Imagine if we could access 100 percent.”" - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Germany puts 700,000 WWI docs online - The Local - http://www.thelocal.de/2014072...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"More than 700,000 records relating to WWI, as well as photos, films and audio recordings were made accessible on a new portal on the Federal Archive's website." - maitani - -

"Hundreds of thousands of rare records and images from World War I have been put online by the German government, ahead of Monday's 100th anniversary of the start of the conflict." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani imported maitani's feed
Babylonian Neurology and Psychiatry - Neuroskeptic | DiscoverMagazine.com - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neurosk...

1 decade ago from Friendfeed - Comment - Hide - - -

"The texts reveal that The Babylonians were remarkable observers and documentalists of human illness and behavior. However, their knowledge of anatomy was limited and superficial. Some diseases were thought to have a physical basis, such as worms, snake bites and trauma. Much else was the result of evil forces that required driving out… many, perhaps most diseases required the attention of a priest or exorcist, known as an asipu, to drive out evil demons or spirits." - maitani - -

"A fascinating little paper in Brain examines Neurology and psychiatry in Babylon. It’s a collaboration by British neurologist Edward H. Reynolds and Assyriologist James V. Kinnier Wilson. The sources they discuss are almost 4,000 years old, dating to the Old Babylonian Dynasty of 1894 – 1595 BC. Writing in cuneiform script impressed into clay tablets, the Babylonians left records that (unlike paper) were inherently durable, so many of them have survived. All understanding of cuneiform was lost, however, for thousands of years, only to be deciphered in the 19th century." - maitani - -

Comment

maitani

Warning!