November 8, 2010
A bialy [bee-ah-lee] is a small roll that is a traditional dish in Polish Ashkenazi cuisine. A traditional bialy has a diameter of up to 15 cm (6 inches) and is a chewy yeast roll similar to a bagel. Unlike a bagel, which is boiled before baking, a bialy is simply baked, and instead of a hole in the middle it has a depression. Before baking, this depression is filled with diced onions and other ingredients, including garlic, poppy seeds, or bread crumbs. The name bialy is Yiddish and short for ‘bialystoker kuchen’ (Bialystok Cake). Białystok is a city in Poland. The bialy was formerly little known outside of New York City, but has started to move into the larger market. They were originally brought into the United States by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The bialy was first marketed in the United States during the early 1900s in the state of New York by Harry Cohen, a proprietor of a bagel (and later bialy) establishment. In 2002, former New York Times food writer Mimi Sheraton wrote a book dedicated to the bialy, called The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World. She examined bialy making and used Kossar’s Bialys as the background, and its long-time union bakers as key references for her research that took her to Poland in search of the original bialy bakers.
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November 8, 2010
Agnotology is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The neologism was coined by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology. More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before. Proctor studied the tobacco industry’s conspiracy to manufacture doubt about the cancer risks of tobacco use. Under the banner of science, the industry produced research about everything except tobacco hazards to exploit public uncertainty.
Some of the root causes for culturally-induced ignorance are media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness. Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not ‘come to be’,’ or are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was delayed for at least a decade because key evidence was classified military information related to underseas warfare.
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November 8, 2010
Jainism [jahy-niz-uhm] is an Indian religion that prescribes a path of non-violence towards all living beings. Its philosophy and practice emphasize the necessity of self-effort to move the soul towards divine consciousness and liberation. Any soul that has conquered its own inner enemies and achieved the state of supreme being is called Jina (Conqueror or Victor). Jainism, which its followers consider to have always existed, has prehistoric origins dating before 3000 BC, and before the beginning of Indo-Aryan culture. Organized Jainism is believed by historians to have arisen between the ninth and the sixth centuries BCE. Some have speculated that the religion may have its roots in much earlier times, reflecting native spirituality prior to the Indo-Aryan migration into India.
In the modern world, it is a small but influential religious minority with as many as 4.2 million followers in India, and successful growing immigrant communities in North America, Western Europe, the Far East, Australia and elsewhere. Jains have successfully sustained this longstanding religion to the present day and have significantly influenced and contributed to ethical, political and economic spheres in India. Jains have an ancient tradition of scholarship and have the highest degree of literacy in India; Jain libraries are the oldest in the country.
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November 8, 2010
A snowclone is a type of cliché and phrasal template originally defined as ‘a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants.’
An example of a snowclone is ‘grey is the new black,’ a version of the template ‘X is the new Y.’ Both the generic formula and the new phrases produced from it are called snowclones.
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November 8, 2010
A sporf is a single eating utensil combining the properties of a spoon, fork, and knife. It was invented by William McArthur in the 1940s in Australia and sold with the brand name ‘Splayd.’ A sporf typically has a spoon shape with fork tines in the middle and flat edges on one or both sides suitable for cutting through soft food.
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November 8, 2010
Bokononism is a fictional religion practiced by many of the characters in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel ‘Cat’s Cradle.’ It is based on the concept of ‘foma,’ which are defined as harmless untruths. The primary tenet of Bokononism is to ‘Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.’
Many of the sacred texts of Bokononism were written in the form of calypsos. The foundation of Bokononism is that all religion, including Bokononism and all its texts, is formed entirely of lies; however, one who believes and adheres to these lies will at least have peace of mind, and perhaps live a good life.
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November 8, 2010
In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs. It is related to, but distinct from, hypocrisy and neutrality. Its opposite is cognitive dissonance, where the two beliefs cause conflict in one’s mind.
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November 7, 2010
Progressivism [pruh-gres-uh-viz-uhm] is a political attitude advocating changes or reform through governmental action. Progressivism is often viewed in opposition to conservative or reactionary ideologies. The Progressive Movement began in cities with settlement workers and reformers who were interested in regulating tenement housing and child labor.
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November 7, 2010
Secular Humanism is a philosophy that espouses reason, ethics, and the search for human fulfillment, and specifically rejects supernatural and religious dogma as the basis of morality and decision-making. Secular Humanism is a life stance that focuses on the way human beings can lead happy and functional lives. The term was coined in the 20th century by British worker’s rights advocate George Holyoake.
Fundamental to the concept is the strongly held belief that ideology—be it religious or political—must be examined by each individual and not simply accepted or rejected on faith. Along with this belief, an essential part of Secular Humanism is a continually adapting search for truth, primarily through science and philosophy. The humanist stance emphasises the unique responsibility facing humanity and the ethical consequences of human decisions.
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November 7, 2010
An orrery [awr-uh-ree] is a mechanical device that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the solar system in a heliocentric model. They are typically driven by a clockwork mechanism with a globe representing the Sun at the centre, and with a planet at the end of each of the arms. The first modern orrery was built circa 1704 by George Graham and Thomas Tompion. Eisinga’s ‘Planetarium’ (actually, an orrery) was built from 1774 to 1781 by Eise Eisinga in his home in Franeker, in the Netherlands. It displays the planets across the width of a room’s ceiling, and has been in operation almost continually since it was created.
According to Cicero, the Greek philosopher Posidonius constructed an orrery that exhibited the diurnal motions of the sun, moon, and the five known planets. Cicero’s account was written in the first century BCE. The Antikythera mechanism is one of the first orreries. It is an ancient mechanical calculator designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in an ancient shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to about 150-100 BC. Technological artifacts of similar complexity would not be common for a thousand years.
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November 5, 2010
The problem of other minds is an epistemological challenge raised by skeptics. It is often expressed as follows: given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The thought behind the question is that no matter how sophisticated someone’s behavior is, behavior on its own is not sufficient to guarantee the presence of mentality. It remains possible, for example, that other people are actually nothing more than meaty automata (or ‘Philosophical zombies’).
Bertrand Russel argued to the contrary that the idea was a logical fallacy, specifically, argument from analogy: ‘where we take two things which are similar in some observed ways and infer from this similarity that they are similar in other unobserved ways. If the observed similarity is not relevant to the posited unobserved similarity then this is a form of fallacy.’
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November 5, 2010
To get around captchas spammers hire companies employing human solvers in Bangladesh, China and India at about $0.80 to $1.20 for each 1,000 solved captchas. Another approach involves copying the captcha images and using them on another site, often one offering free pornography in exchange for filling out a captcha.
With enough traffic, the attacker can get the solutions in time to relay it back to the target site. These methods have been used by spammers to set up thousands of accounts on free email services such as Gmail and Yahoo!. Since Gmail and Yahoo! are unlikely to be blacklisted by anti-spam systems, spam sent through these compromised accounts is less likely to be blocked.
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