Rafe Biggs, 43, worried he’d never feel sexual pleasure again until thumbthing changed.
The Oakland, Calif., resident, who was paralyzed from the chest-down when he fell off a roof nine years ago, discovered that he gets “orgasmic sensations” when his thumb is sucked or massaged.
“I never thought it would be possible, but massaging and sucking on my thumb, feels a lot like my penis used to feel — it’s really hot,” Biggs, who calls his thumbs his “surrogate penis” said.
Experts describe the phenomenon as a “transfer orgasm”, where people with paralysis experience sexual highs in other parts of their bodies.

If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us–through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives–we are each of us unique.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too …. Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”

ケガしたことは残念ですけど、もうしょうがないですし。ケガして思ったのは僕、チャンスやなと。
オレはチャンスやなと思ってるんですけどね。

神様がほんままた、いらん障壁ばっか立てますけど、もう望むところですよね。この壁だって神様に感謝しないと。この状況を与えてくれてありがとうって。
思ったように事が運ばない、それもまた人生。いかなる時も前向きにね。うまくいかないときほど前向きに、ですよね。大事なのは自分が成長することやから。

Because the program is purely formal or syntactical and because minds have mental or semantic contents, any attempt to produce a mind purely with computer programs leaves out the essential features of the mind.

In Australia, rabbits are a serious mammalian pest and invasive species. They were introduced in the 18th century with the First Fleet, and became widespread after an outbreak caused by an 1859 release. Rabbits cause millions of dollars of damage to crops. Various methods in the 20th century have been attempted to control the population. Conventional methods include shooting and destruction of warrens, but these had only limited success. In 1907, a rabbit-proof fence was built in western Australia in an attempt to contain the rabbits. The Myxoma virus was introduced into the rabbit population in the 1950s, and had the effect of severely reducing the rabbit population.

日本人の平均寿命は何千年も前には15、6才であったと考えられる。
17世紀の初めに30才前後だった日本人の平均寿命は、18世紀には30代半ば、19世紀には30代後半の水準に達している。
「人生わずか50年」と言われたが、江戸時代はもとより、明治になってもこれに達するのはなかなかで、第一回生命表（1891～98年調査）では出生時平均余命は男42.8才、女44.3才にすぎなかった。
50才を超えたのは1947年である。この年に調査された第8回生命表で、男50.1才、女54.0才と初めて50才台に乗ったのである。

Life Expectancies

* Longevity: Average Lifespan at Birth　(years)

The function of neural circuits is an emergent property that arises from the coordinated activity of large numbers of neurons. To capture this, we propose launching a large-scale, international public effort, the Brain Activity Map Project, aimed at reconstructing the full record of neural activity across complete neural circuits. This technological challenge could prove to be an invaluable step toward understanding fundamental and pathological brain processes.

• All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
• It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
• Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
• It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
• And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
• I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.
• When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.
• I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
• No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
• Anything that just costs money is cheap.
• As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.
• There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.
• A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
• Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
• I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
• And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

Agafia Lykova is the only living member of a family, which went into seclusion in 1937 to preserve its religious traditions. They were Old Believers, Orthodox Christians who adhere to the teachings of the church prior to its reforms in the mid-17th Century.
A local hunter who visits the 69-year-old from time to time, told her about President Medvedev and his attitude towards Siberia. The woman was so impressed that she decided to send him something as a sign of gratitude.
The home-made gifts include a blue traditional skew-collared shirt, a birch bark box with a dedication inscribed and a pouch of cedar nuts.

So now that the first batch of animals is done, I’ve been gearing up to present fifty plant species of Nereus. I’m still working to get all the plants into a satisfactory cladogram and taxonomic classification, but things are coming along nicely. I’ve decided that, rather than featuring individual species I’ll focus on genera, that way I’ll be able to speak in more, well, general terms (notice the pun? ;)). I noticed many times while working with animal species that I was occasionally limited in what possibilities I could explore within a given entry; hopefully writing about a genus at a time rather than a species will allow me a little more flexibility in coverage.
Another aspect I’m considering, and would love some reader feedback on, is the order of presentation. The animals were grouped by biome, but with the plants I could present them a clade at a time, producing them in groups based on genetic relationship rather than by shared environment.

僕、ダウン症なんですけど、知的障害ってどういう意味ですか？ (あべけん太　ダウン症)

“知的”って何？　“障害”って何？　— けん太さんは、日頃抱いている素朴な悩みから、街頭インタビューを決行。しかし、納得のいく答えは得られなかった。何気なく使っている言葉の意味を改めて考えさせる質問にスタジオの議論も白熱した。

「『知的障害者というネーミングに納得がいかない』という あべさんのVTR にみなさんが反応されていたのが 印象的でした」
吉木りささん「例えば なにかを理解することに時間がかかる人なのかもしれないけど　それが　知的　という言葉になってしまうと　うーん」
カンニング竹山さん「そろそろ　言葉を変えてもいいのかな　そう思いましたね　この前　『障害者』って漢字って書いたときに　意外にキツいイメージがあるなと思ったんですよね　そこには差別が入ってるんじゃないかなと　こういう時代だから　ガラッと変えてもいいんじゃないかもしれないな　そういう問題提起をしていってもいいじゃないかなと思いました」

In the Western world most of us tend to ignore, and even to repress from consciousness, phenomena that do not fit the belief encapsulated in the tenet of classical empiricism, “There is nothing in the mind that was not first in the eye.” This is a powerful belief, and it is likely to limit the occurrence of ITC to people who either have a natural disposition to receiving information of nonsensory origin or are able to open their minds sufficiently not to repress the intuitions they may occasionally receive. The myth of sense-reductionist empiricism affects most segments of Western society.

Something can be called individual in various ways:
that is called individual which cannot be divided at all, such as unity or spirit (i);
that which cannot be divided because of its hardness, such as steel, is called individual (ii);
something is called individual, the specific designation of which is not applicable to anything of the same kind, such as Socrates (iii).

In the simplest terms, the individual is considered to be an indivisible self or person. That is, it refers to something like the essential core, or spirit of a singular human being, which, as a whole, defines that self in its particularity. To change, remove or otherwise alter any part of that whole would fundamentally alter the ‘self’; she/he would then be, effectively, a different person. By contrast, the dividual is considered to be divisible, comprising a complex of separable—interrelated but essentially independent—dimensions or aspects. The individual is thus monadic, while the dividual is fractal; the individual is atomistic, while the dividual is always socially embedded; the individual is an autonomous social actor, the author of his or her own actions, while the dividual is a heteronomous actor performing a culturally written script; the individual is a free-agent, while the dividual is determined by cultural structures; the individual is egocentric, and the dividual is sociocentric.

We have a thriving biotechnology industry in the United States. There are over 1,450 biotechnology companies developing diagnostic and treatment technologies in medicine, creating more nutritional foods, and innovating new industrial processes. Yet this $28.5 billion sector of the economy is not without controversy. The “bio” in biotechnology comes from living, biological entities – people, plants, animals, and even bacteria. In the realm of biobanking, people are the source of the raw material for the discovery of genes for research, diagnosis, and therapy, raising a host of issues about rights and responsibilities, fiduciary duties and societal obligations.
When I was growing up, it was said that the chemicals in the body were worth 89 cents. Today, though, like a bullish stock market, the price tags on body parts have soared. The value of a human egg can be tens of thousands of dollars. A single cadaver can be mined for medical and research uses – its skin worth $36,522, its bones $80,000, its tendons $21,400, and so forth. The value of a particularly interesting human gene – or even snippets of human genetic material – can be billions.

Lori Andrews argues for a liberalisation of almost all laws which still stand in the way of full-fledged commercialisation of reproduction, including those concerning the human body and its parts and substances. Andrews’ views in favour of “reproductive alternatives” and the “body as property” constitute, in my view, the necessary ideological legitimation for the new reproduction industry, which in its greed for profit has to do away with the integrity of the individual, the human person. Instead, it favours the logic of the “dividual”: a person’s wholeness reduced to saleable and disposable bits and pieces. To me, this so-called liberal feminism is a perversion of everything the ideology of women’s liberation stands for. In addition, I argue that Andrews’ liberalism, which apparently is directed against the “right to life” movement, is in fact not so far removed from it, since both will lead to more state intervention in reproductive processes.

… persons – single actors – are not thought in South Asia to be “individual,” that is, indivisible, bounded units, as they are in much of Western social and psychological theory as well as in common sense. Instead, it appears that persons are generally thought by South Asians to be “dividual” or divisible. To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances – essences, residues, or other active influences – that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated.

(The research, carried out by Dr Barry Molloy, investigated the Bronze Age people of Crete, known by many as the Minoans, who created the very first complex urban civilisation in Europe.)
Their world was uncovered just over a century ago, and was deemed to be a largely peaceful society. In time, many took this to be a paradigm of a society that was devoid of war, where warriors and violence were shunned and played no significant role.
That utopian view has not survived into modern scholarship, but it remains in the background unchallenged and still crops up in modern texts and popular culture with surprising frequency.
Having worked on excavation and other projects in Crete for many years, it triggered my curiosity about how such a complex society, controlling resources and trading with mighty powers like Egypt, could evolve in an egalitarian or cooperative context. Can we really be that positive about human nature? As I looked for evidence for violence, warriors or war, it quickly became obvious that it could be found in a surprisingly wide range of places.
The study shows that the activities of warriors included such diverse things as public displays of bull-leaping, boxing contests, wrestling, hunting, sparring and duelling. Ideologies of war are shown to have permeated religion, art, industry, politics and trade, and the social practices surrounding martial traditions were demonstrably a structural part of how this society evolved and how they saw themselves.

予防接種をしても免疫が形成されない。一生持続すると考えられていた免疫が、何年かたつと消滅してしまう。世間に予防接種が行き届いた結果、病気になる人が激減し、人間はその病原体に触れる機会を持てない。すると体内の抗体は機能しないまま、いずれ消滅してしまう。そして予防接種をしていたからと安心していたら、思いがけず病気になってしまうということがある。その他、諸々、公衆衛生が発達して結果、人間は外敵にもろくなってしまった。病気が猛威を振るった時代、予防接種は人類を救う救世主のように感じられたと思う。それが結果として、人間を弱くしてしまったというのは、なんとも皮肉なものだ。
他にも同じような例はいろいろある。例えばフロン。これを作り出したときは、夢の工業製品だったことだろう。誰もオゾン層破壊という結果が待ち受けているとは予想だにしなかった。
地球温暖化もそうだろう。化石燃料を自由自在に使いこなせるようになって人間の生活は飛躍的に進歩した。皆、自分たちが幸せだと感じた。でもその結果、二酸化炭素が増加し地球の温度が上がり、今や、気象異常が頻発している。
人類の発展や皆の幸福のためによかれと思って成し遂げた技術の開発が、予想もしない結果を引き起こしたからといって、誰も責めることはできないと思う。これはもう連帯責任で、人類みな等しく、負わなければならないことだろうと思う。

Temporally restricted feeding (RF) can phase reset the circadian clocks in numerous tissues in mammals, contributing to altered timing of behavioral and physiological rhythms. However, little is known regarding the underlying molecular mechanism. Here we demonstrate a role for the gamma isotype of protein kinase C (PKCγ) in food-mediated entrainment of behavior and the molecular clock.

If the sinful excess of holiday eating sends your system into butter-slathered, brandy-soaked overload, you are not alone: People who are jet-lagged, people who work graveyard shifts and plain-old late-night snackers know just how you feel.
All these activities upset the body’s “food clock,” a collection of interacting genes and molecules known technically as the food-entrainable oscillator, which keeps the human body on a metabolic even keel. A new study by researchers at UCSF is helping to reveal how this clock works on a molecular level.
Published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the UCSF team has shown that a protein called PKCγ is critical in resetting the food clock if our eating habits change.

Write. Draw. Take photos. Film. Make music. Sing. Sew. Cook. Paint. Or even just pick up stuffs and make a performance. Art done with heart is never bad. And even if we haven’t seen the result today, we’ll never know, a simple writing or drawing can be very meaningful one day… for art products are records that will give future people a picture of what has happened in this era. And not just simply what has happened, it also comes with a feeling—or at least a perspective—of the creator.
In digital world, these records are called contents. In cultural context, they are called history. We often talk about how our history is filled with violence, sadness, wars and stories of pain. Well… why not help those who have done otherwise, filling history with inspirations? Or even a simple beauty?
I’m sure there are plenty of beauties around the world, even in the countries where we only heard about violence and wars in the news. I think this is where the digital world can help to outweigh the negativities by providing more actual positive contents. And we can help to write the next history of humankind.

人類の進化はアフリカ中部で15万年以前まで続いていました。チンパンジーも勿論その時代に同じ場所に棲息していました。そしておそらくB型肝炎ウイルスの祖先もそのころから存在しいて、人類とチンパンジーに人畜共通感染していた可能性があります。
人類は、アフリカ中部で進化した後、南北の二方向に移動し、アフリカ南端には12万年以前に到着しました。北方へはまずユーラシア大陸に、そしてアジアとヨーロッパの東西二方向に分かれ、アジアからは南にオーストラリアまで、北はベーリング海峡に達しました。そして、ベーリング海峡が陸続きであった2万年以前には新大陸に渡り、北アメリカを経て南アメリカの先端に到達したのは1万年前のことです。これは、勿論有史前の先住民がたどった足跡で、戦略と貿易を目的とした有史後の民族移動は含みません。
人類が農耕を始めたのは、僅かに5千年以前のことで、それまでは狩猟が主な生存手段だったのでしょう。特に火を入手した1万年以前からは、食肉調理の方法が大幅に改良したはずです。
人類は移動した先々で、野生の類人猿を狩猟し摂食する課程で、彼らに感染していた土地固有のB型肝炎ウイルスに感染する機会があったものと思われます。その総合的な結果として、人類の中で7種の遺伝子型を持ったB型肝炎ウイルスが進化しました。

On a waggon bound for market, there’s a calf with a mournful eye.
High above him there’s a swallow, winging swiftly through the sky.
How the winds are laughing, they laugh with all their might.
Laugh and laugh the whole day through, and half the summer`s night.
Donna, Donna, Donna, Donna; Donna, Donna, Donna, Don.
Donna, Donna, Donna, Donna; Donna, Donna, Donna, Don.
“Stop complaining!“ said the farmer, who told you a calf to be ?
Why don`t you have wings to fly with, like the swallow so proud and free?“
Calves are easily bound and slaughtered, never knowing the reason why.
But who ever treasures freedom, like the swallow has learned to fly.

And still there is Ms. Y. In her teens she observed various strange vision impressions and gradually discovered that, in spite of the statements of her relatives, “Green is not a boring colour”. Sooner or later she observed that the green leaves of bush can easily be distinguished from the green wire-fencing.
Mere trichromats can see distinctly any plant even on the fence background, but from bigger distance they tend to merge. Not for Ms. Y who tells that she easily sees the borderline “from any distance”; if any merging occurs, then, at great distances, the fence merges with blue objects. Also she lacks Fency and her favoured Turquoises in TV’s and of course cannot mix it in computers. She tells that European colour photography rather use Grassy while Japanese ones rather Fency. On a national holyday she detected difference between the national Red-White-Green flags on neighbouring houses: one was Red-White-Grassy, the other Red-White-Fency. She was rather hilarious when discovering that on the signboard of a bio shop the desirable plants and herbs were painted with Fency. She reports that all the Plant Kingdom, with one sure and one possible exception, uses Grassy.

Nature’s imagination, as Freeman Dyson likes to say, is richer than ours, and he speaks, marvellingly, of this richness in the physical and biological worlds, the endless diversity of physical forms and forms of life. 

For me, as a physician, nature’s richness is to be studied in the phenomena of health and disease, in the endless forms of adaptation by which human organisms, people, adapt and reconstruct themselves, faced with the challenges and vicissitudes of life. Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence.

How Many People Have Ever Lived On Earth? 108 Billion

Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates.

Au lieu de former des athlètes, nous devons former des hommes modernes. Et les hommes modernes ont besoin d’équilibre nerveux, d’intelligence, de résistance à la fatigue et d’énergie morale, plus que de puissance musculaire. L’acquisition de ces qualités ne peut pas se faire sans effort et sans lutte. C’est-à-dire sans l’aide de tous les organes. Elle demande aussi que l’être humain ne soit pas exposé à des conditions de vie auxquelles il est inadaptable. On dirait qu’il n’y a pas d’accommodation possible à l’agitation incessante, à la dispersion intellectuelle, à l’alcoolisme, aux excès sexuels précoces, au bruit, à la contamination de l’air, à l’adultération des aliments. S’il en est ainsi, il sera indispensable de modifier notre mode de vie et notre milieu, même au prix d’une révolution destructive. Après tout, la civilisation a pour but, non pas le progrès de la science et des machines, mais celui de l’homme.

いくら平和になろうと
人間は苦しむだろう
たとえ平等の世が来ようと
人間はかなしむだろう
地上に生きとし生ける者に
悲嘆と苦悩の尽きることはなかろう
だが新しい時代はやってくる
赫赫として明日の太陽といっしょに
希むらく
新しき時代に生きん
新しき嘆きに泣き
新しい悩みを悩もう
それら嘆きと悩みの上に
ひとすじ真実の橋を架けよう

When you stop trying to control unwanted thoughts and emotions, they stop controlling you. Studies of brain activation confirm that as soon as you give participants permission to express a thought they were trying to suppress, that thought becomes less primed and less likely to intrude into conscious awareness. Paradoxically, permission to think a thought reduces the likelihood of thinking it.
This solution turns out to be useful for a surprisingly wide range of unwanted inner experiences. The willingness to think what you think and feel what you feel – without necessarily believing that it is true, and without feeling compelled to act on it – is an effective strategy for treating anxiety, depression, food cravings, and addiction.

There’s more bullying, more incivility, more disrespect and even more relationship violence between us at home, at work, in our communities and in the news. And, it seems to be increasing rather than decreasing.
We have noticed a pattern to this behavior that is all too familiar. It generally includes:
•  Personal Attacks (calling the other person crazy, stupid, immoral or evil)
•  Crisis Emotions (which trigger fear and hatred of each other)
•  All-or-Nothing Solutions (which call for the elimination or exclusion of the “other”)
•  Narcissistic Behavior (acting superior and not caring about anyone else)
•  Negative Advocates (constantly recruiting others to join in this hostility)
We are well-acquainted with this pattern in high-conflict divorces, and it’s not good. This behavior is called “high-conflict” because it increases the conflict, rather than reducing or resolving it. Worst of all, it’s contagious – it spreads when people are exposed to it, like a virus.
This behavior results in a state of mind called “splitting” – the psychological term for truly believing that certain people are absolutely all-bad and others are absolutely all-good, with no gray areas in between.

Et si nous étions tous là par hasard, simplement parce que nous sommes le résultat non prévu de l’évolution du monde. Pénible pour votre ego de vous imaginer le fruit du hasard, plus que d’une volonté ?
Je vous sens sur le point d’accepter cette existence née du hasard, mais vous restez persuadé que vous êtes né pour quelque chose, pour une mission secrète, pour mettre en œuvre une volonté immanente. Votre existence doit bien avoir un sens, quand même !
Je ne crois pas. Nous sommes nés pour rien. Nous sommes juste là, comme cela, un maillon possible et provisoire du vivant.
Est-ce désespérant ? Non je ne trouve pas. Je me sens plus léger, sans fardeau préalable sur mes épaules. Personne n’attend rien de moi.

Whores are expected to do things for nothing.

Solitude, the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself-is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic. All men, at some moment in their lives feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be seperated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition.

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

Tout homme est un criminel qui s’ignore. Le criminel objectif est celui qui, justement, croyait être innocent.

A boozed up groom, 27, was caught having sex with a waitress in the kitchen at his wedding reception just hours after tying the knot in Feldkirch, Austria.
The groom was caught by the father of the bride when he went looking for him in the kitchen.
After seeing what the young man was doing he stopped the party, and told all the guests to go home.
The bride now wants a quick divorce – but has been told she will have to wait six months under Austrian law.

Plants and animals have adapted to their environments genetically and by means of physiological, behavioral, or developmental flexibility, including both instinctive behavior and learning. Adaptation has many dimensions in that most organisms must conform simultaneously to numerous different aspects of their environments. Adaptation involves coping not only with the physical abiotic environment (light, dark, temperature, water, wind), but also with the complex biotic environment (other organisms such as mates, competitors, parasites , predators, and escape tactics of prey).
Every individual is simultaneously a member of a population, a species, and a community; therefore, it must be adapted to cope with each and must be considered in that context. An individual’s fitness — its ability to perpetuate itself as measured by its reproductive success — is greatly influenced by its status within its own population. An individual might be a resident or a vagrant, mated or unmated, or high or low in a pecking order, all factors that strongly affect its fitness.
Ultimately, natural selection operates only by differential reproductive success. An individual’s ability to perpetuate itself as measured by its reproductive success is known as its Darwinian fitness.

En las entrañas del campamento más peligroso de Haití, los reporteros de El Universal realizan una muy buena investigación periodística. Video: Agencia de El Universal. Todos los derechos reservados.

母性愛というのは動物行動学では否定されてます。ようするに、自分の血のつながった子孫をとにかくたくさん残したい。それには赤ん坊だから育てなくちゃいけないんで、一生懸命育てる。その時に、一体それは誰の得になるのかという問題ね。母親にしてみれば自分の血のつながった子孫が増えてもらいたいというのは母親の得になります。そのためには育てなければいけない。しかも、その時その赤ん坊は自分が生んだ子供だから絶対自分の血がつながった赤ん坊なんだ。これを育て上げないと自分の子孫は増えないわけですね。そのために一生懸命やってるんで、本当は自分のためにやってることで、赤ん坊が可愛くてやってることじゃないんだということになっちゃうんです。
だから母性愛なんてなくて、それは母親のエゴである、ということになってるんです。その証拠、という例があってね。これ、随分残酷な話なんですが、ネコが子供を生むでしょ、5匹ぐらい。その中で１匹だけどういうわけかわからないけど、小さくてヒヨヒヨしてるのがいる。そうするとたいていの場合、母ネコはヒヨヒヨしてる子ネコには乳をやらないんです。3日ぐらいやらないと飢え死にしちゃうんです。飢え死にするとたいてい母ネコはその子ネコを食っちゃいます。自分の子供ですよ。で、これはなんだ、と。残酷といえば残酷なんだけど、でも、この母ネコにすれば自分の子供が可愛いんじゃなくて、自分の血のつながった子孫ができるだけ増えて欲しいと思ってるから、今このヒヨヒヨした子供に自分の限りある乳をやっても多分育たないだろうと。そうするとその乳をやったことは無駄な投資になる。だからそれは見殺しにして、乳は将来見通しのある4匹の丈夫なほうにやる。しかも死んだ子ネコをおなかの中で育てるのに、相当な栄養をやっている、つまりコストがかかってますから、それを取り返すべく食べちゃう。そのタンパク質を取り返してミルクにしてちゃんとした子供に与える。というようなことまでやっているのではないか。このどこに母性愛があるか。
そういう例が実は非常にたくさんあるんです。だから母性愛なんていうのは人間がヒョイと考えた、ある種の美しい幻想にすぎないのではないかということになってるんですよ。

女は、身長が狩りに及ぼす影響も、またそれが狩リの成果であることも、ほとんどわかっていなかっただろう。ただわけもなく背の高い男に惹かれてしまう女は、結果的に十分な食べ物を手に入れ、子を多く残せたのである。
男の身長はかつての「月収」だった。愚かなことに、女はまだそれにこだわっているというわけだ。

Недавно американские ученые разгадали одну из самых сложных и интересных загадок эволюции — каким образом живые организмы приобрели модульное строение? Они выяснили, что модульность развивалась не потому, что она расширяла возможности эволюции, а потому, что позволяла снизить энергетические затраты на самоподдержание целостности всей системы.

Je trouve qu’on ne devrait pas mal traiter les immigrés de Grèce. Il ne faut pas oublier qu’avant ce sont nous qui étions à leur place et qui partions à l’étranger pour trouver du travail, une vie. Nous sommes tous humains.

Usain Bolt might be the world’s fastest man but … The cheetah can reach sprint speeds of 104 kph.

五輪のたびに審判問題が起こるように見えるが、どの競技も常に問題は抱えている。ただ、注目度が違うから目立つ。普段は競技を見ない人も、テレビをつける。問題があればテレビのワイドショーでも繰り返し扱うから「五輪は誤審ばかり」の印象を受ける。
身体能力と技術が向上するから、審判の判断はどんどん難しくなる。５０年前の体操や柔道を見ると、技も分かりやすく、判定もしやすいだろうと感じる。しかし、今の技のスピード、複雑さに審判もついていけなくなる。だからこそ、各競技は「誤審」をなくすためにあらゆる策を講じる。
テクノロジーの導入も１つだ。ビデオ判定は、最も代表的なもの。当初は人間の下す判断の補助的なものだったが、その役割は年々大きくなっている。さらに「審判の審判」導入。より公平な判断を下すために審判のミスをチェックする。
あらゆるスポーツで、審判は重要だ。審判がいなければ、スポーツは成り立たない。

昔も今も、また未来においても変わらないことがある。そこに空気と水、それに土などという自然があって、人間や他の動植物、さらには微生物にいたるまでが、それに依存しつつ生きているということである。
自然こそ不変の価値なのである。なぜならば、人間は空気を吸うことなく生きることができないし、水分をとることがなければ、かわいて死んでしまう。
さて、自然という「不変のもの」を基準に置いて、人間のことを考えてみたい。
人間は・・・・繰り返すようだが・・・・自然によって生かされてきた。古代でも中世でも自然こそ神々であるとした。このことは、少しも誤っていないのである。歴史の中の人々は、自然をおそれ、その力をあがめ、自分たちの上にあるものとして身をつつしんできた。
この態度は、近代や現代に入って少しゆらいだ。
・・・・人間こそ、いちばんえらい存在だ。
という、思い上がった考えが頭をもたげた。２０世紀という現代は、ある意味では、自然へのおそれがうすくなった時代といってもいい。
同時に、人間は決しておろかではない。思いあがるということとはおよそ逆のことも、あわせ考えた。つまり、私ども人間とは自然の一部にすぎない、というすなおな考えである。

ずるい者が成功し、お人好しは生涯苦労する時代だ。その例はざっと周りを見渡しただけで枚挙にいとまがない。
わかるのは、まじめに生きたらそこから抜け出しにくい、ということと、ズルく生きれば成功は比較的容易に掴める、という私の“実感”だ。
思い起こせば、ベンチャー系といわれる領域は、どこかうさん臭さが漂うことがめずらしくはない。実直に働くより、一発当てたい人間がいるのは昔からで今に始まったことではない。
要は、当てて、それでどうするか、に私はズルさを感じているのだと思う。
“当てたら浪費”を誰もが疑わない感覚。“当てたら逃げろ”の発想。
もはや、譲り合いやら、共に生きる的発想は雲散霧消したと私は感じている。震災で日本人の素晴らしい連帯を見たのも事実だが、“当てて脱出”組や、“当てて浪費”タイプはその中にカウントされない。助け合い精神も確実に存在するが、当て逃げ層もしっかり確立されている社会だ。
では、次に、“逃げ切れるのか”だ。

「人のいい人」は概して人付き合いがよく仲間を愉快にさせ、なくてはならない存在ですが、それだけの存在であって、重要なことを任せるにはとても危険な存在です。　なぜ人付き合いがいいかと言えば、自分に自信が持てないので他の人に嫌われるとなにもできなくなるので、相手に嫌われないようにつき合いをよくしているからではないでしょうか。　いつも周囲のことばかり気にして生きている人だと言ったら言い過ぎでしょうか。　本人はこのことを意識していない場合が多いと思いますが、私の経験からはこのように思えます。　責任感が乏しいので、大切なことは任せられないのです。　このような人に大切なことや時限のあることを頼んでひどい目にあったことはありませんか。　決して悪い人ではないのですが、自覚が乏しいので当てにできないのです。　たんなる遊び仲間でしかないのです。

英国ギネス世界記録社からメールがあり、今回記録申請した、2件無事に認定が取れました。
一つ目は昨年9月に達成した自己記録である、飛行距離１６．４ｋｍを ２３．１ｋｍに大幅に更新。
さらに自由降下時間も前回プラス25秒の５分２２秒になりました。
また、今回新たにギネス・カテゴリー申請した、水平方向移動での最高速度記録では、時速３６３ｋｍという驚異的なスピードを出しました。
スカイダイビングをはじめて23年。この挑戦を企画してから3年、延べ300回以上のウイングスーツ飛行を重ねて、今回のこの夢を実現することが出来ました。これまでご協力いただいた皆様、関係各社の方々に感謝申し上げます。
今後も引き次き記録更新、新たな挑戦を行っていきますのでよろしくお願いいたします。

Patrick de Gayardon (23 January 1960, Oullins, Rhône – 13 April 1998) was a French skydiver, skysurfer and a BASE jumper.
De Gayardon was famous for pushing the boundaries of skydiving. He was one of the first people to develop the unique style of skysurfing, in which skydivers use a snowboard to make aerobatic maneuvers. He also made many famous stunts with his wing-suit (sometimes referred to as a “bat suit”).

If somebody asked you about the difference between humanism and humanitarianism, what would you say?
I’d begin by quoting Albert Schweitzer: ‘Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.’ Then I’d point out that this is a principle to which most humanists would at least pay lip service, but that humanists often embrace other principles besides (e.g. scientism, atheism, anti-clericalism, etc.) which sometimes take precedence over humanitarianism in their respective scales of value. I’d also point out that religious belief is not necessarily incompatable with humanitarianism. And I would probably end by suggesting that humanitarianism is the antithesis of the ‘us vs. them’ mentality that characterises many humanists in their relation to those (e.g. humanists, theists, proponents of laïcité) who embrace principles which are at odds with (and therefore perceived as inferior to) to their own.

Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.

與別人結合在一起採取行動是人類最大的潛在資產之一，人不僅是各有不同 特性的個體，而且是社會的存在。
六百年來人文主義傳統代表的東西：拒絕接受決定論或簡化論的關於人的觀 點，堅持認為人雖然並不享有完全的自由，但在某種程度上仍掌握著選擇的自由 。但是人文主義態度並不保證大家都會做出好的選擇，正確的預見結果，或者避 開災禍，而只保證，如果我們能找到勇氣和意願來作選擇，那麼仍有很多選擇供 我們去作。

Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.

John Allman, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was searching for a peculiar kind of brain cell that he suspects is a key to how the African elephant—like a human being—manages to stay attuned to the ever-shifting nuances of social interplay. These spindle-shaped brain cells, called von Economo neurons—named for the man who first described them—are found only in human beings, great apes and a handful of other notably gregarious creatures. Allman, 66, compares the brains of people and other animals to gain insight into the evolution of human behavior.
… Whales and elephants, like people and great apes, have large brains and a prolonged juvenile stage during which they learn from their elders. They recognize one another and develop lifelong cooperative relationships. Killer whales hunt in groups and protect injured pod mates. Elephant society is anchored by matriarchs that guide their herds to watering holes they know from previous visits.
… This unusual neural system seems to underlie a lot of what makes us human. But the fact that elephants and whales apparently share the same neural hardware opens the mind to a tilt in perspective: our brains may be more similar to those of other smart, social animals than we thought.

東京スカイツリーが開業。初日は雨にもかかわらず、22万人が来場した。テレビも、スカイツリーばっかり。それでも見てしまう。
実はいま、人間が風景や人の顔を好きになっていくとき、脳の中でどのようなことが起こっているのか、少しずつ明らかになっている。スカイツリーのように今まで見たこともない風景を目にすると、脳は見るたびに好きになっていく性質が見つかった。
カリフォルニア工科大学の研究で明らかになったのだが、人間の脳は、新しい風景はすぐに飽きてしまうという性質がある。ところが、人間の顔については、脳はぜんぜん飽きない。それどころか、見れば見るほど、さらにその人のことが好きになっていく。脳の中では、人の顔と風景では、まったく違う性質が働いていることがわかってきた。しかもそれは、人間が生き残ってくるのにとても役立った性質だった。
人の顔については、見れば見るほど好きになる、飽きが来ないというのは、集団で仲良く暮らすのに役立った。もともと人類は、小人数の集団で暮らしていた。毎日、同じ顔を見ても、飽きずに、どんどん好きになることが、争いを避けるのに好都合だった。
一方、風景については、求められる条件がまったく違う。安全な場所に定住するには、ある程度は、同じ風景を好きにならないといけない。しかし、ずっと一箇所にとどまっているだけだと、繁栄できないので、適度に新しい場所に関心を持たないといけない。そのためには、風景について、適度に飽きることが必要。だから、人の顔は飽きないのに、風景については飽きるようになった。なんとも合理的な仕組みだ。

Récemment, j’ai été diagnostiqué D.A.D.A. – Déficit d’Attention Dû à l’Age
Voilà comment cela se manifeste :
Je décide de laver ma voiture.
Alors que je vais vers le garage, je remarque qu’il y a du courrier sur la table de l’entrée.
Je décide de regarder le courrier avant de laver la voiture.
Je pose mes clés de voiture sur la table, mets dans la corbeille à papiers, en dessous de la table, tout le courrier publicitaire et remarque que la corbeille est pleine.
Alors, je décide de reposer les factures sur la table et de vider d’abord la corbeille.
…

The capacity for getting along with our neighbour depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves.The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor’s shortcomings as he is of his own.
The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbour as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves.
We are tolerant towards others when we tolerate ourselves.
We forgive others when we forgive ourselves.
We prone others to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

Je ne suis pas d’accord avec toi, mais je te laisse faire par respect des différences.

De toutes les religions, la chrétienne est sans doute celle qui doit inspirer le plus de tolérance, quoique jusqu’ici les chrétiens aient été les plus intolérants de tous les hommes.

L’homme propose, et Dieu dispose. …
Aujourd’hui, tout le monde pose. L’homme propose, la femme dispose, l’industrie expose, le commerce dépose, les sciences composent, et les grands hommes reposent.

How can Tiger turn it around? “If he ever asked me what I thought he needed to do, I’d tell him, look, go on the practice tee without anybody—without me, without Sean, without Haney, without a camera, and start hitting golf shots. Hit some high draws, some low draws, high fades, low fades, move the ball up and down, move it around; don’t worry about how you do it and go back to feeling it again. Quit playing golf-swing and just hit shots; just say to himself, I’m gonna hit a low fade, and I don’t need anybody to tell me how to do it, I’m just gonna feel it. He’s Tiger Woods, for God’s sake. He doesn’t know how to hit a shot?” Woods declined to comment.

世の人相逢ふ時、暫くも黙止する事なし。必ず言葉あり。その事を聞くに、多くは無益の談なり。世間の浮説、人の是非、自他のために、失多く、得少し。
これを語る時、互ひの心に、無益の事なりといふ事を知らず。

The medicine wheel consists of the four cardinal directions and four sacred colors representing certain properties:

• blue (north) … defeat; trouble … winter – a season for survival and waiting
  Wisdom, intellect, the adult self, MIND
  Element = Wind/Breath
• yellow (east) … success; triumph … spring – a re-awakening, the power of new life
  Illumination, creation, the wonder child self, SPIRIT
  Element = Fire/Life Source
• black (west) … death … autumn – the final harvest, the end of life’s cycle
  Introspection and intuition, the physical body, MANIFESTATION
  Element = Earth
• white (south) … peace; happiness … summer – a time of plenty
  Trust and Innocence, EMOTIONS
  Element = Water
• Center … learning, SELF
  Balance, beauty, harmony

The symbolism may vary from tribe to tribe.

>The tip of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins.
The new view is fast supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.
Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.
Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. In a sense, we are a hybrid species. …
The Denisovans (pronounced dun-EE-suh-vinz) were first described a year ago in a groundbreaking paper in the journal Nature made possible by genetic sequencing of the girl’s pinky bone and of an oddly shaped molar from a young adult.
Those findings have unleashed a spate of new analyses.

>According to A. Barbour, author of Louder Than Words: Nonverbal Communication, the total impact of a message breaks down like this:

• 7 percent verbal (words)
• 38 percent vocal (volume, pitch, rhythm, etc)
• 55 percent body movements (mostly facial expressions)

Effective communication is the combined harmony of verbal and nonverbal actions. Nonverbal communication consists of body movement, facial expressions and eye movement.
Body Movement indicates attitude, conveys feelings serves as illustrators and regulators. Illustrators are nonverbal movements that accompany and illustrate verbal communication.

>One of the main reasons why ear piercing is prevalent among the male members of the tribe before is because they believe that metals can drive away evil spirits. There were also some tribes who used ear piercing to symbolize the dependence of their young adults to them by the time they reach puberty.
Eventually, ear piercing became a status symbol particularly during the Roman Empire. Some of the popular figures who had their ears pierced include Julius Caesar, Francis Drake, and even Shakespeare himself also had one as well. For them, the accessories that you put in the ear symbolize power, luxury, and wealth.
Until today, many people all over the world (especially those who live in Western countries) are still into ear piercing.

>It is not your obligation to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit.

>Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

>I seems to me that we are not very good at disagreeing. You see this come up over and over. The basis is this notion that disagreement is a form of war and that winning is what matters. War makes things so easy because they are black and white: if we don’t kill them they’ll kill us. Not a lot of reason to debate in such a context. However, most disagreement is not war and to treat it as such turns potential allies into enemies and cripples the healthy process of intellectual debate.

>Hundreds of Michigan residents — and others — may have been infected with HIV by a man who told police he’d been on a three-year mission to transmit the disease to as many people as he could.
Police arrested David Dean Smith, 51, last week after he turned himself in — and admitted he had unprotected sex with “thousands” of partners with the intention of killing them by infecting them with the virus.
Only two possible victims have yet been identified.

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>Most people learn the basics behind sex when Mom, Dad or the sex-ed teacher sit them down for a talk about where babies come from. And sure, sex is about reproduction. But it also has a number of pleasant side effects that aren’t quite as well-known. Here are six things (safe) sex can do for you.
6.: Reduce Anxiety
5.: Make you happy
4.: Boost immunity
3.: Soothe your pain
2.: Decrease neuroticism
1.: Reduce prostate cancer risk

A group affiliation is formed when actors (a) perceive themselves as members of a group and (b) share resources with each other despite an underlying competitive structure. We apply a concept of structural cohesion to small networks of exchange and identify two dimensions of such networks that foster a group affiliation: the network-wide potential for inclusion in exchanges and the inequality of structural power. These structural properties are theorized to generate positive emotions and cognitions that promote collectively oriented behavior toward others in the exchange network, even if such behavior runs counter to individual self-interest. We theorize and test how and when such structural properties give rise to embedded social relations, thereby forging connections between micro theories of exchange and macro theories of social embeddedness.

>Based on two years of fieldwork and over 100 interviews, we analyze mixed martial arts fighters’ fears, how they managed them, and how they adopted intimidating personas to evoke fear in opponents. We conceptualize this process as “managing emotional manhood,” which refers to emotion management that signifies, in the dramaturgical sense, masculine selves. Our study aims to deepen our understanding of how men’s emotion work is gendered and, more generally, to bring together two lines of research: studies of gendered emotion management and studies of emotional identity work. We further propose that managing emotional manhood is a dynamic and trans-situational process that can be explored in diverse settings.

>When mixed martial arts fighters need to show off masculine strength and confidence, they suppress fear, empathy, pain and shame.
Yeah, not too shocking: that tamping down those emotions might make someone seem more formidable. But the research, published in December in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly, was aimed at understanding how men manage their emotions and expectations of manhood.
“Managing emotional manhood, whether it occurs in a locker room or board room, at home or the Oval Office, likely plays a key role in maintaining unequal social arrangements,” study author Christian Vaccaro of Indiana University of Pennsylvania said in a statement.

>Antidepressant drugs and psychotherapy combined are more effective in treating mood disorders than either treatment alone, but the neurobiological basis of this interaction is unknown. To investigate how antidepressants influence the response of mood-related systems to behavioral experience, we used a fear-conditioning and extinction paradigm in mice. Combining extinction training with chronic fluoxetine, but neither treatment alone, induced an enduring loss of conditioned fear memory in adult animals. Fluoxetine treatment increased synaptic plasticity, converted the fear memory circuitry to a more immature state, and acted through local brain-derived neurotrophic factor. Fluoxetine-induced plasticity may allow fear erasure by extinction-guided remodeling of the memory circuitry. Thus, the pharmacological effects of antidepressants need to be combined with psychological rehabilitation to reorganize networks rendered more plastic by the drug treatment.

>禅とは禅那、意訳すると静慮、つまり静かに慮るという意味です。
—
我々はつい「俺が」とか「他人が」とか、分別を加えて周りの人を見てしまいます。人間は表層心理で認識されてくる世界を「自分が」「他人が」と限定してくる、その心を自我執着心＝末那識と呼んでおります。深層に働き、常に自分と認識せざるを得ないこの心の説明はとても難しい。しかしこの心の存在があるから、全ての表層的な行為が全て自分に跳ね返ってくるという事を覚えておいて下さい。
「自分の子供だから可愛い」といった、自分中心の愛は無心の愛でもなんでもないですね。
ですから自分の全てを人のために費やすように決心をされ、菩提心を発して、日々の生活の中で、蝋燭の火の様に、光と暖かさを擲っていこうではないかと、私は自分に言い聞かせ。。。

>Assuring the President that the current rules for research participants protect people from harm or unethical treatment, domestically, as well as internationally, is at the heart of the Commission’s charge on human subjects protection.

>They thought “we’re in a war against disease and in war soldiers die.”
It’s too easy to say “Oh, we’d never do anything like that.”
We really need to think about what we’re doing now that’s going to look horrible in 20 years.

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>None of us can stand perfectly still. No matter how hard we try, our bodies constantly make small adjustments, causing us to sway slightly as we stand. A new study finds that people with bipolar disorder tend to sway more than those who are unaffected, which may lead to new ways to treat and diagnose the illness.
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Indiana University psychologist Amanda Bolbecker points out that the cerebellum, located at the base of the brain, helps to regulate movement and is also involved in emotional reactions, such as fear and pleasure. In addition, the cerebellum connects to other parts of the brain linked to cognition, mood regulation and impulse control, three areas in which patients with bipolar disorder often have difficulties. If the cerebellum is damaged at the cellular level, it may create problems with both mood and motor control.

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>There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

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