July 30, 2014
The Monobloc [mon-uh-blok] chair is a lightweight stackable polypropylene chair, often described as the world’s most common plastic chair. Based on original designs by the Italian designer Vico Magistretti in 1967, variants of the one-piece plastic chair went into production with Allibert Group and Grossfillex Group in the 1970s. Since then, millions have been manufactured globally. Many design variants of the basic idea exist.
The Monobloc chair is so named because it is injection molded from thermoplastic polypropylene, the granules being heated to about 220 degrees Celsius, and the melt injected into a mold. The gate of the mold is usually located in the seat to ensure smooth flow to all parts of the tool. The chairs cost approximately $3 to produce, making them affordable across the world. Social theorist Ethan Zuckerman describes them as having achieved a global ubiquity: ‘The Monobloc is one of the few objects I can think of that is free of any specific context. Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are.’
Posted in Money, Technology, World |
Leave a Comment »
July 29, 2014
A psychopomp [sahy-koh-pomp] (from the Greek word ‘psuchopompos,’ literally meaning the ‘guide of souls’) are creatures, spirits, angels, or deities in many religions whose responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls to the afterlife. Their role is not to judge the deceased, but simply provide safe passage. Frequently depicted on funerary art, psychopomps have been associated at different times and in different cultures with horses, deer (harts) dogs, and several birds, such as whip-poor-wills, ravens, crows, owls, sparrows, cuckoos.
In Jungian psychology, which stresses the importance of the symbolic in human life, the psychopomp is a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms. It is symbolically personified in dreams as a wise man or woman, or sometimes as a helpful animal. In many cultures, the shaman (medicine man) also fulfills the role of the psychopomp. This may include not only accompanying the soul of the dead, but also vice versa: to help at birth, to introduce the newborn child’s soul to the world. This also accounts for the contemporary title of ‘midwife to the dying,’ or ‘End of Life Doula’ which is another form of psychopomp work.
Posted in Death, Philosophy |
Leave a Comment »
July 28, 2014
Historic recurrence is the repetition of similar events in history. The concept has been used to analyze the overall history of the world (e.g., the rise and fall of empires), repetitive patterns in the history of a given polity, and generally to any two specific events which bear a striking similarity. Professor of religious history Garry W. Trompf, in his book ‘The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought,’ traces historically recurring patterns of political thought and behavior in the west since antiquity. Historic recurrences can sometimes induce a sense of ‘convergence,’ ‘resonance,’ or déjà vu.
In the extreme, the concept assumes the form of the doctrine of Eternal Return (the belief that universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space), found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics (with the decline of antiquity and the spread of Christianity, the concept fell into disuse in the Western world, with the exception of existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who connected the thought to many of his other concepts, including ‘amor fati,’ love of one’s fate).
read more »
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, World |
Leave a Comment »
July 24, 2014
A combo washer dryer (also known more simply as a washer-dryer in the UK) is a combination in a single cabinet of a washing machine and a clothes dryer. It should not be confused with a ‘stackable’ combination of a separate washing machine and a separate clothes dryer.
While combo washer dryers are not as effective and efficient as full-sized, fully functional, separate washer and dryer machines, they are useful in smaller urban properties as they only need half the amount of space and most don’t require an external air vent (water vapor is condensed from moist air and flushed out the drain hose). Additionally, combination washer dryers allow clothes to be washed and dried ‘in one go,’ saving time and effort from the user. Many units are also designed to be portable so they can be attached to a sink instead of requiring a separate water line.
read more »
Posted in Technology |
Leave a Comment »
July 23, 2014
The picaresque [pik-uh-resk] novel (Spanish:’picaresca,’ from ‘pícaro,’ for ‘rogue’ or ‘rascal’) is a popular subgenre of prose fiction which might sometimes be satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. This style of novel originated in 16th-century Spain and flourished throughout Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word ‘picaro’ does not appear in ‘Lazarillo de Tormes’ (1554), the novella credited with founding the genre. The expression ‘picaresque novel’ was coined in 1810. The genre continues to influence modern literature.
Picaresque novels are usually written in first person as an autobiographical account. A Lazarillo or picaro character is an alienated outsider, whose ability to expose and ridicule individuals compromised with society gives him a revolutionary stance. Lazarillo states that the motivation for his writing is to communicate his experiences of overcoming deception, hypocrisy, and falsehood (desengaño).
read more »
Posted in Art, Humor |
1 Comment »
July 22, 2014
The Vulcan salute is a hand gesture consisting of a raised hand, palm forward with the fingers parted between the middle and ring finger, and the thumb extended. The salute was devised and popularized by Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed the half-Vulcan character Mr. Spock on the original ‘Star Trek’ television series in the late 1960s.
The gesture famously has a reputation for being difficult for some people to make without practice or the covert pre-positioning of the fingers, and actors on the original show reportedly had to position their fingers off-screen with the other hand before raising their hand into frame. This reputation may stem from variations in individuals’ manual dexterity. This reputation is parodied somewhat in the motion picture ‘Star Trek: First Contact’ when Zefram Cochrane, upon meeting a Vulcan for the first time in human history, is unable to return the Vulcan salute gesture and instead shakes the Vulcan’s hand.
read more »
Posted in Art, Humor |
Leave a Comment »
July 21, 2014
The nothing to hide argument broadly states that police surveillance is only adverse to those doing something wrong. By this line of reasoning, government data mining and surveillance programs do not threaten privacy unless they uncover illegal activities, and if they do, the guilty person does not have the right to keep them private. The motto ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’ was used to advertise closed-circuit television programs in the UK.
Geoffrey Stone, a legal scholar, said that the use of the argument is ‘all-too-common.’ Cryptographer Bruce Schneier described it as the ‘most common retort against privacy advocates.’ He cites French statesman Cardinal Richelieu’s statement ‘If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged,’ to describe how a state government can find aspects in a person’s life in order to prosecute, defame, or blackmail that individual. Schneier also argued ‘Too many wrongly characterize the debate as ‘security versus privacy.’ The real choice is liberty versus control.’
read more »
Posted in Politics, Technology |
1 Comment »
July 18, 2014
Haecceity [hek-see-i-tee] (from the Latin ‘haecceitas’: ‘thisness’) is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by thirteenth century Scottish theologian Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object’s ‘thisness,’ the individualizing difference between, for example, the concept ‘a man’ and the concept ‘Socrates’ (a specific person).
American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce later used the term as a non-descriptive reference to an individual. It may also be defined in some dictionaries as simply the ‘essence’ of a thing, or as a simple synonym for quiddity (‘whatness’) or hypokeimenon (‘underlying thing’). However, such a definition deprives the term of its subtle distinctiveness and utility. Whereas haecceity refers to aspects of a thing which make it a particular thing, quiddity refers to the universal qualities of a thing, or the aspects shares with other things (which is relevant to taxonomy, the science of classification).
read more »
Posted in Language, Philosophy |
Leave a Comment »
July 17, 2014
The Album Era was a period in English-language popular music from the mid 1960s to the mid 2000s in which the album was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption. It was primarily driven by three successive music recording formats, the 331⁄3 rpm phonograph record (1931), the audiocassette (1964), and the compact disc (1982).
In 1999, peer-to-peer file sharing application Napster was released, popularizing digital copies of music. The ease of downloading individual songs facilitated by it and later networks is often credited with ushering in the end of the Album Era in popular music.
read more »
Posted in Art, Money, Technology |
2 Comments »
July 16, 2014
Napster was a peer-to-peer (P2P) music sharing application first developed in 1999 by Shawn Fanning at Northeastern University. The original program was available for three years before being shut down by a court order for copyright violations. The company’s brand and other assets was subsequently acquired at a bankruptcy proceeding by Roxio, maker of CD burning software. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until it was bought by music streaming site Rhapsody in late 2011.
Fanning lead the original company along with his uncle John Fanning and entrepreneur Sean Parker (who would go on to make billions as an early employee of Facebook). Later companies and projects successfully followed its P2P file sharing example such as Gnutella, Freenet, and many others. Some services, like LimeWire, Grokster, Madster and the original eDonkey network, were brought down or changed due to similar circumstances.
read more »
Posted in Money, Politics, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
July 15, 2014
Antireductionism [an-tee-ri-duhk-shuh-niz-uhm] is a reaction against reductionism (the idea that a system can be totally determined by understanding its components), which instead advocates holism (sometimes called ‘whole to parts,’ in which a contextual overview precedes analysis of constituent parts).
Although ‘breaking complex phenomena into parts, is a key method in science,’ there are those complex phenomena (e.g. in psychology, sociology, ecology) where some resistance to or rebellion against this approach arises, primarily due to the perceived shortcomings of the reductionist approach. Holism is touted as an effective antidote against reductionism, psychiatric hubris, and scientism, a belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method. Arguments against reductionism therefore implicitly carry a critique of the scientific method itself, which engenders suspicion among scientists.
read more »
Posted in Philosophy, Science |
Leave a Comment »
July 14, 2014
Neo-Luddism is a philosophy opposing many forms of modern technology. According to a manifesto drawn up by the ‘Second Luddite Congress’ in 1996: Neo-Luddism is ‘a leaderless movement of passive resistance to consumerism and the increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age.’ The name is based on the historical legacy of the British Luddites, textile artisans who rebelled against the Industrial Revolution and newly developed labor-saving machinery that threatened their livelihoods. Both the original Luddites and their modern counterparts are characterized by the practice of destroying or avoiding technological equipment as well as advocating simple living.
Neo-Luddism stems from the concept that technology has a negative impact on individuals, their communities and the environment. It also seeks to examine the unknown effects that new technologies might unleash. The modern Neo-Luddite movement has connections with the anti-globalization movement, anarcho-primitivism (a political critique of the origins and progress of civilization), radical environmentalism, and Deep Ecology (a contemporary environmental philosophy advocating for the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to humans). The word Luddite is also used as ‘a derogatory term applied to anyone showing vague technophobic leanings.’
read more »
Posted in Politics, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
The Daily Omnivore 