Best Of
Re: Buddhist quotes
"Since we were born, we have let our mind do what it likes, like a spoiled child, and we have to admit that nothing really positive has come of it. To take control of it is indispensable. That is something worth spending time on, even if it is just a little bit each day."
JIGME KHYENTSE RINPOCHE (b. 1964)
marcitko
Re: Radicalism
Information on how to think in the current climate change:
Approximately 70% of all people who get cancer have eaten pickles.
Most people who have recently died in car accidents ate a pickle in the past year.
All Americans who ate pickles in 1901 have died.
Therefore, pickles obviously kill people.
lobster
Re: Should a Buddhist own a gun ?
I also don't feel comfortable with the notion of "should". People, and Buddhists, can do what they want with their lives.
Yes, a Buddhist can technically do whatever they want (and I know I often do), but the real question is whether those choices move us toward liberation and compassion, or deeper into suffering and entanglement.
Bearing in mind that guns were developed for the purpose of killing or maiming, their very existence sits uneasily alongside the Buddhist precept of avoiding harm.
Shoshin1
Re: My favourite 'cult'
It seems the use of cult style language is on the rise and in lots of places these days.
person
Re: Should a Buddhist own a gun ?
Should a Buddhist own a gun?
I think the answer is clear: No.
But a Buddhist should not do many things, so if one owns a gun, it's not the end of the world.
marcitko
Re: Radicalism
@RobinH said:
I often hear that pornography is harmful or can be potentially harmful because it can shape the way you see healthy sexual relations in your own life. I think the algorythm does something similar to how we perceive healthy political relations and discussions.
I’d pick out two golden periods of political thought, one which led to the US constitution, which was a time of discourse in letters and papers between learned men, and the second the time after the Second World War, when the United Nations was formed.
There has been a long slide in learned discourse between then and now. Most people who hold forth on political opinions do not have a historical perspective, and have had their heads in the internet bubble chamber for the past ten years.
I saw an interview with the maker of the film Idiocracy not long ago, and he was saying the film was proving to be remarkably prophetic. It’s about an ordinary man who travels into the future, and discovers that most humans have become stupid, and that he is now hailed as a genius who is put forward to rule the country.
Jeroen
Re: Radicalism
The algorythm is a crazy propaganda tool. It also seems so chaotic...
In the sense of, it does not care which rabbit hole you fall through. It just loosens up the selection and tricks you into more and more of these clever punchlines, highly articulated verbosity or just horror shock with intense facts.
I try to feed it good music.
Kotishka
Re: Space - the final frontier
I have been very enthusiastically following the news about the new ground-based Vera Rubin Telescope in Chile. From what I can tell, it has excited astronomers worldwide on par with the launch of Hubble or James Webb.
It has a mirror of 8.4 meters, which is like the largest ground-based telescopes, so nothing special. But it has a HUGE field of view, something like 500-1000x the field of view of other ground-based telescopes. So the idea is to image the whole sky visible from Chile every 3 days, by making many short exposures of 30 seconds, and to keep surveying the whole sky like that for 10 years.
The effect will be that everything that changes will be detected like never before: asteroids, interstellar objects (that we have only begun to detect), supernovae, novae, variable stars... It will also make the largest catalogue of galaxies and stars to date (10 billion of each).
I was already geeking out, but then I found out that the Director of Construction, and once the telescope is operational the Director of Science, is Željko Ivezić, a Croatian who went.. to my high-school! He's really great in terms of getting people excited but staying scientific and at explaining the science behind it in simple terms but without dumbing it down too much.
To be clear: Since it will be making many very short exposures, we should not expect "beautiful pictures", like eg. Hubble or Keck. However, after 10 years, since the images can be "stacked", it will be possible to have both "beautiful pictures" (stacked images of the region over 10 years) AND a "movie" of the whole sky (a time-series of a region of sky or the whole sky).
A few photos have already been unveiled and the actual survey should start in a few months.
First photos unveiling text:
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/the-first-pictures-from-vera-rubin-are-here
First photos unveiling press-conference:
marcitko