November 25, 2011
Day for night, also known as nuit américaine (‘American night’), is the name for cinematographic techniques used to simulate a night scene; such as using tungsten-balanced rather than daylight-balanced film stock or with special blue filters and also under-exposing the shot (usually in post-production) to create the illusion of darkness or moonlight. Historically, infrared movie film was used to achieve an equivalent look with black-and-white film.
Another way to achieve this effect is to tune the white balance of the camera to a yellow source if there is no tungsten setting. Another way to make a more believable night scene is to underexpose the footage to the desired degree of night/darkness. This depends on the amount of light shown or believed to be in the given scene. The title of François Truffaut’s film ‘Day for Night’ (1973) is a reference to this technique.
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November 25, 2011
In Hinduism and yoga kundalini [koon-dl-ee-nee] (literally ‘coiled’) is a ‘corporeal energy,’ an unconscious, instinctive or libidinal force or Shakti, which lies coiled at the base of the spine. It is envisioned either as a goddess or else as a sleeping serpent, hence a number of English renderings of the term such as ‘serpent power.’ The kundalini resides in the sacrum bone in three and a half coils and has been described as a residual power of pure desire.
Kundalini is described as a sleeping, dormant potential force in the human organism. It is one of the components of an esoteric description of man’s ‘subtle body,’ which consists of nadis (energy channels), chakras (psychic centers), prana (subtle energy), and bindu (drops of essence).
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November 25, 2011
Ryoji Ikeda (b. 1966) is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in Paris. Ikeda’s music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of ‘raw’ states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing. The conclusion of his album ‘+/-‘ features just such a tone; of it, Ikeda says ‘a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance.’
Rhythmically, Ikeda’s music is highly imaginative, exploiting beat patterns and, at times, using a variety of discrete tones and noise to create the semblance of a drum machine. His work also encroaches on the world of ambient music; many tracks on his albums are concerned with slowly evolving soundscapes, with little or no sense of pulse.
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November 25, 2011
Salt therapy, halotherapy or speleotherapy is the therapeutic use of salt mines, caves or other forms of exposure to salt air. These natural deposits of mineral halite are derived from evaporated ancient lakes and seas. The unrefined rock salt, primarily sodium chloride, also includes varying concentrations of other mineral salts such as calcium and magnesium, manganese and sulfates which have additional therapeutic properties, depending on the source.
Modern use of this therapy started in Germany when Dr. Karl Hermann Spannagel noticed improvement in the health of his patients after they hid in the Kluterthöhle karst cave to escape heavy bombing. It is now practised in places such as Bystrianska in Slovakia, Wieliczka in Poland, and Solotvyno in Ukraine.
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November 25, 2011
Nabiximols (trade name Sativex) is a cannabinoid mouth spray developed by the UK company GW Pharmaceuticals for multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, who can use it to alleviate neuropathic pain, spasticity, overactive bladder, and other symptoms. Nabiximols is also being developed in Phase III trials as a potential treatment to alleviate pain due to cancer. It has also been researched in various models of peripheral and central neuropathic pain.
Nabiximols is distinct from all other pharmaceutically produced cannabinoids currently available because it is derived from cannabis plants, rather than a solely synthetic process. The drug is a pharmaceutical product standardized in composition, formulation, and dose, although it is still effectively a tincture of the cannabis plant. Its principal active cannabinoid components are the cannabinoids: tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). The product is formulated as an oromucosal spray which is administered into the mouth. Each spray delivers a fixed dose of 2.7 mg THC and 2.5 mg CBD.
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November 25, 2011
‘Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions’ is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as ‘A Square,’ Abbott used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture.
However, the novella’s more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions, for which the novella is still popular amongst mathematics, physics, and computer science students.
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November 25, 2011
Big History is a field of historical study that examines history on large scales across long time frames through a multidisciplinary approach, focusing on both the history of the non-human world and on major adaptations and alterations in the human experience. It arose as a distinct field in the late 1980s and is related to, but distinct from, world history, as the field examines history from the beginning of time to the present day. In some respects, the field is thus similar to the older universal history (the presentation of the history of humankind as a whole, as a coherent unit).
Big history looks at the past on all time scales, from the Big Bang to modernity, seeking out common themes and patterns. It draws on the latest findings from many disciplines, such as biology, astronomy, geology, climatology, prehistory, archeology, anthropology, cosmology, natural history, and population and environmental studies. Big History arose from a desire to go beyond the specialized and self-contained fields that emerged in the 20th century and grasp history as a whole, looking for common themes across multiple time scales in history. Conventionally, the study of history concerns only the period of time since the invention of writing, and is limited to past events relating directly to the human race; yet this only encompasses the past 5,000 years or so and covers only a small fraction of the period of time that humans have existed on Earth, and an even smaller fraction of the age of the universe.
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November 25, 2011
A Short History of Nearly Everything is a popular science book by American author Bill Bryson that explains some areas of science, using a style of language which aims to be more accessible to the general public than many other books dedicated to the subject.
‘A Short History’ deviates from Bryson’s popular travel book genre, instead describing general sciences such as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics.
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November 25, 2011
The fascination with death extends far back into human history. Throughout time, people have had obsessions with death and all things related to death and the afterlife. In past times, people would form cults around death gods and figures. Famously, Anubis, Osiris, and Hades have all had large cult followings.
La Santa Muerte (Saint Death), or the personification of death, is currently worshiped by many in Mexico and other countries in Central America. Day of the Dead, November 2, is a celebration for the dead.
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November 25, 2011
Junk food news is a sardonic term for news stories that deliver ‘sensationalized, personalized, and homogenized inconsequential trivia,’ especially when such stories appear at the expense of serious investigative journalism.
It implies a criticism of the mass media for disseminating news that, while not very nourishing, is ‘cheap to produce and profitable for media proprietors.’
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November 25, 2011
Hysterical contagion occurs when a group of people show signs of a physical problem or illness, when in reality there are psychological and social forces at work. It is a strong form of social contagion, which describes the copycat effect of imitative behavior based on the power of suggestion and word of mouth influence, because the symptoms often include those associated with clinical hysteria. The June bug epidemic serves as a classic example of hysterical contagion. In 1962 a mysterious disease broke out in a dressmaking department of a US textile factory. The symptoms included numbness, nausea, dizziness, and vomiting. Word of a bug in the factory that would bite its victims and develop the above symptoms quickly spread.
Soon sixty two employees developed this mysterious illness, some of whom were hospitalized. The news media reported on the case. After research by company physicians and experts from the US Public Health Service Communicable Disease Center, it was concluded that the case was one of mass hysteria. While the researchers believed some workers were bitten by the bug, anxiety was likely the cause of the symptoms. No evidence was ever found for a bug which could cause the above flu-like symptoms, nor did all workers demonstrate bites. Workers concluded that the environment was quite stressful; the plant had recently opened, was quite busy and organization was poor. Further, most of the victims reported high levels of stress in their lives. Social forces seemed at work too.
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November 25, 2011
Deviancy amplification spiral is a media hype phenomenon defined by media critics as a cycle of increasing numbers of reports on a category of antisocial behavior or some other ‘undesirable’ event, leading to a moral panic. The term was coined in 1972 by Stanley Cohen in his book, ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics.’ According to Cohen the spiral starts with some ‘deviant’ act. Usually the deviance is criminal, but it can also involve lawful acts considered morally repugnant by a large segment of society.
With the new focus on the issue, hidden or borderline examples that would not themselves have been newsworthy are reported, confirming the ‘pattern.’ Reported cases of such ‘deviance’ are often presented as just ‘the ones we know about’ or the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ an assertion that is nearly impossible to disprove immediately. For a variety of reasons, the less sensational aspects of the spiraling story that would help the public keep a rational perspective (such as statistics showing that the behavior or event is actually less common or less harmful than generally believed) tends to be ignored by the press.
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