Nature Videos Quotes

To all the secret writers, late-night painters, would-be singers, lapsed and scared artists of every stripe, dig out your paintbrush, or your flute, or your dancing shoes. Pull out your camera or your computer or your pottery wheel. Today, tonight, after the kids are in bed or when your homework is done, or instead of one more video game or magazine, create something, anything. Pick up a needle and thread, and stitch together something particular and honest and beautiful, because we need it. I need it. Thank you, and keep going.

If you think along the lines of Nature then you think properly." from the video "Carl Jung speaks about death

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.

Autumn is a momentum of the natures golden beauty…, so the same it’s time to find your momentum of life

Buddha says: Look into the nature of desire. Watch the movement of desire; it is very subtle. And you will be able to see two things: one, that desire by its very nature is unfulfillable. And second, the moment you understand that desire is unfulfillable, desire disappears and you are left desireless. That is the state of peace, silence, tranquility. That is the state of fulfillment! People never come to fulfillment through desire; they come to fulfillment only by transcending desire.

There is nothing wrong with technology. It's a gift! I don't think we should keep our kids away from the modern conveniences of our time, but I do believe it's time to regain some balance. Children can benefit from technology, but they need nature. Let them have their video games and Internet, but make sure they are getting equal amounts of mud, dirt, sticks, puddles, free play and imagination.

Boys and men have a natural, biological sex drive, you see, but when girls and women express sexuality, it’s because they’ve been led astray by music videos or vampire movies or something. Never

Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children's sports in history.

If you're reading this, you must be in dire need of a change. The same thing happened to me, long ago. I'd lost sight of what mattered most in life... real connections with other people and nature. So I dropped everything and moved to the place I truly belong.

As the video game designer and writer James Wallis puts it, “Human beings like stories. Our brains have a natural affinity not only for enjoying narratives and learning from them but also for creating them. In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story.

He used to watch NBC until he decided Brian Williams was a good-natured goof who’s too fond of YouTube videos.

when you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it's can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS

10 ways to raise a wild child. Not everyone wants to raise wild, free thinking children. But for those of you who do, here's my tips: 1. Create safe space for them to be outside for a least an hour a day. Preferable barefoot & muddy. 2. Provide them with toys made of natural materials. Silks, wood, wool, etc...Toys that encourage them to use their imagination. If you're looking for ideas, Google: 'Waldorf Toys'. Avoid noisy plastic toys. Yea, maybe they'll learn their alphabet from the talking toys, but at the expense of their own unique thoughts. Plastic toys that talk and iPads in cribs should be illegal. Seriously! 3. Limit screen time. If you think you can manage video game time and your kids will be the rare ones that don't get addicted, then go for it. I'm not that good so we just avoid them completely. There's no cable in our house and no video games. The result is that my kids like being outside cause it's boring inside...hah! Best plan ever! No kid is going to remember that great day of video games or TV. Send them outside! 4. Feed them foods that support life. Fluoride free water, GMO free organic foods, snacks free of harsh preservatives and refined sugars. Good oils that support healthy brain development. Eat to live! 5. Don't helicopter parent. Stay connected and tuned into their needs and safety, but don't hover. Kids like adults need space to roam and explore without the constant voice of an adult telling them what to do. Give them freedom! 6. Read to them. Kids don't do what they are told, they do what they see. If you're on your phone all the time, they will likely be doing the same thing some day. If you're reading, writing and creating your art (painting, cooking...whatever your art is) they will likely want to join you. It's like Emilie Buchwald said, "Children become readers in the laps of their parents (or guardians)." - it's so true! 7. Let them speak their truth. Don't assume that because they are young that you know more than them. They were born into a different time than you. Give them room to respectfully speak their mind and not feel like you're going to attack them. You'll be surprised what you might learn. 8. Freedom to learn. I realize that not everyone can homeschool, but damn, if you can, do it! Our current schools system is far from the best ever. Our kids deserve better. We simply can't expect our children to all learn the same things in the same way. Not every kid is the same. The current system does not support the unique gifts of our children. How can they with so many kids in one classroom. It's no fault of the teachers, they are doing the best they can. Too many kids and not enough parent involvement. If you send your kids to school and expect they are getting all they need, you are sadly mistaken. Don't let the public school system raise your kids, it's not their job, it's yours! 9. Skip the fear based parenting tactics. It may work short term. But the long term results will be devastating to the child's ability to be open and truthful with you. Children need guidance, but scaring them into listening is just lazy. Find new ways to get through to your kids. Be creative! 10. There's no perfect way to be a parent, but there's a million ways to be a good one. Just because every other parent is doing it, doesn't mean it's right for you and your child. Don't let other people's opinions and judgments influence how you're going to treat your kid. Be brave enough to question everything until you find what works for you. Don't be lazy! Fight your urge to be passive about the things that matter. Don't give up on your kid. This is the most important work you'll ever do. Give it everything you have.

On this voyage, I couldn't help but think we need need. We need to be forced to go outside. We need to be forced to depend on one another. we need to be forced to sacrifice, to grow a garden, to fix a rood, to interact with neighbors. Nature has been all around me as a boy. It unleashed terrifying storms, spun circular cycles, inflicted bone-chilling, cold and renewed itself with springy revivifications. Yet I was completely oblivious to it all. I was playing video games.

For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day.... To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.

I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what it contained-the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes-and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves, lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt. It is such a strange contrast. When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules. Even the little towns like Franklin and Hiawassee and even Gatlinburg are just way stations scattered helpfully through the great cosmos of woods. But come off the trail, properly off, and drive somewhere, as we did now, and you realize how magnificently deluded you have been. Here, the mountains and woods were just backdrop-familiar, known, nearby, but no more consequential or noticed than the clouds that scudded across their ridgelines. Here the real business was up close and on top of you: gas stations, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Dunkin Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness.

The word 'viral' is perfect at describing the contagious effect caused by the combination of human nature and technology. And, of course, it isn’t just videos and products and tweets that can be contagious. Emotions can be, too. A completely connected world has the potential to go mad, all at once.

In the event of a change in cabin pressure, the flight attendant on the video was saying, you put your oxygen mask on first, pulling the cord, and then you helped others in your party who needed your assistance. The video showed a nice-looking dad tugging the oxygen mask over his own face, his placid daughter sitting quietly beside him, breathing bad air. What kind of idiot came up with that rule? The didn't understand human nature at all. She imagined the compartment filling slowly with smoke and Noah beside her, gasping. Did they really think that she could straighten the mask on her own face and breathe in clean air while her asthmatic son struggled to take a breath? The assumption was that she and her child were two different entities with seperate hearts and lungs and minds. They didn't realise that when your child was gasping for air, you felt your own breath trapped in your chest.

To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes. … The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children.”64

Vane, you okay in there?” my mom calls through my door. I jump so hard I crash into my desk and knock off some books and video game cases. If my mom comes in and finds a gorgeous girl in a skimpy dress passed out on my worn gray rug, I’ll be grounded for the rest of eternity. Especially since all I have on at the moment are my Batman boxers. Pretty sure she won’t buy my ghost-guardian angel/freak-of-nature theories either. I stumble toward the door, prepared to barricade it with my dresser if I have to. “I’m fine, Mom,” I say as I grab the first T-shirt I see off my floor and throw it on, along with my gym shorts. “Then what’s all that banging?” Come on, Vane. Think! Inspiration strikes. “I found a date roach in my bed.” “Did you kill it?” My mom sounds farther away, like she jumped back. “I tried to, but now I can’t find it.” I don’t need to worry about my mom offering to help. She’s a big believer in the whole boys should kill all the bugs philosophy. “Well, I won’t distract you, then,” she says, and I can’t help smiling.

Because people like stuff. New stuff, even newer stuff. Stuff to replace old stuff with and old stuff that is so old it becomes retro stuff and starts being used instead of new stuff. Let me tell you, it's fun stuff. Sometimes we have to get rid of stuff to make room for new stuff. And then we start to miss the old stuff so much that we have to build new stuff that pretends to be the old stuff. Like when we put TV screens on the treadmills at the gym and then play videos of trees on them so that we feel like we're running through the forest. Yes, I know what you're thinking. Why don't you just go running into the forest to begin with? and it's completely ok to wonder that. You don't know any better. But you see, we had to cut down the trees in the forest in order to build a highway so we could drive our cars to the gym. And yes, I can already see what you're thinking: Why did you have to cut down the trees? But hey, what did you want us to do? They were standing in the middle of the highway. It's complicated stuff to explain.

One day, back when I working at a video store, a woman accompanied by her two small sons walked up the counter with a tape box displaying a man slicing off someone’s head with a chainsaw. “Does this have any sex in it?” she asked. In my mind, it was like I was narrating a nature documentary on humans. “Watch as the American mother protects her young ones from dangerous influences.

He imagined having a home to go to at the end of the day where he could rest. It was like a lump in his throat, the idea of going home. Home. Where his worst worry would be what’s for dinner. Where he’d be able to go to his room and lay on his bed without being afraid of it, where he’d be able to go online or play video games and then do his homework at his own pace, where he’d be safe, where he’d be lov—

The stranglehold pop culture has on us lies in its cyclical nature: it is both a mirror and an influence. There’s a reason moral panics have happened because of books, films, music videos, and video games. The stories and characters we see onscreen, the ones we grow up with, the ones that we enjoy publicly, and the ones that we secretly think are only ours to understand—all those stories influence how we see the world and how we see ourselves.

We in the West regard the universe as a creation of God; like an invention or a product. After he created the universe, God set himself to oversee it and manage it. We see God as our boss. He created the universe, he is present in it, he manages every part of it, but he is still separate from it. It's like he installed video cameras all over the universe, so he can see everything that happens, and he can cause this or that to happen, but he is not a part of what happens. The Eastern view is very different. To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around.

Lands that stretch on forever. Skies one could drown in. The heartbeat of nature, silent yet strong. And amidst it all, a people. Beacons of light and life. Laughter that warmed my heart like naught else before. They are my meaning and my purpose. My love. In spite of...or perhaps because of this, I choose to believe. In mankind's potential. In his ability to find a way forward. So let there be no way back. From that temptation I sunder us. No more shall man have wings to bear him to paradise. Henceforth, he shall walk.

Since their invention about half a century ago, video games have come to play a vital role in modern human civilization. I think this is because we modern humans were never designed to live like we do now—sitting in traffic, working in offices, shopping in stores. We are, by design, hunter-gatherers. Millions of years of evolution have wired our brains with an inherent need to hunt, gather, explore, solve puzzles, form teams, and conquer challenge after challenge in order to survive as we claw our way to the top of the food chain. For most people, day-to-day life no longer requires many of those experiences or challenges, and so those primal, instinctive needs inside us have no natural outlet. To keep our minds and bodies healthy, we have to simulate those old ways in the midst of our modern, technological lives, where everything on the planet has already been hunted and gathered. Thankfully, the technology that created this problem also gave rise to its solution—a way for us modern city dwellers to exorcise our inner evolutionary demons: video games.

Tony Williams: You’ve often mentioned that Tales of Hoffmann (1951) has been a major influence on you. George Romero: It was the first film I got completely involved with. An aunt and uncle took me to see it in downtown Manhattan when it first played. And that was an event for me since I was about eleven at the time. The imagery just blew me away completely. I wanted to go and see a Tarzan movie but my aunt and uncle said, “No! Come and see a bit of culture here.” So I thought I was missing out. But I really fell in love with the film. There used to be a television show in New York called Million Dollar Movie. They would show the same film twice a day on weekdays, three times on Saturday, and three-to-four times on Sunday. Tales of Hoffmann appeared on it one week. I missed the first couple of days because I wasn’t aware that it was on. But the moment I found it was on, I watched virtually every telecast. This was before the days of video so, naturally, I couldn’t tape it. Those were the days you had to rent 16mm prints of any film. Most cities of any size had rental services and you could rent a surprising number of films. So once I started to look at Tales of Hoffmann I realized how much stuff Michael Powell did in the camera. Powell was so innovative in his technique. But it was also transparent so I could see how he achieved certain effects such as his use of an overprint in the scene of the ballet dancer on the lily ponds. I was beginning to understand how adept a director can be. But, aside from that, the imagery was superb. Robert Helpmann is the greatest Dracula that ever was. Those eyes were compelling. I was impressed by the way Powell shot Helpmann sweeping around in his cape and craning down over the balcony in the tavern. I felt the film was so unique compared to most of the things we were seeing in American cinema such as the westerns and other dreadful stuff I used to watch. Tales of Hoffmann just took me into another world in terms of its innovative cinematic technique. So it really got me going. Tony Williams: A really beautiful print exists on laserdisc with commentary by Martin Scorsese and others. George Romero: I was invited to collaborate on the commentary by Marty. Pat Buba (Tony’s brother) knew Thelma Schoonmaker and I got to meet Powell in later years. We had a wonderful dinner with him one evening. What an amazing guy! Eventually I got to see more of his movies that I’d never seen before such as I Know Where I’m Going and A Canterbury Tale. Anyway, I couldn’t do the commentary on Tales of Hoffmann with Marty. But, back in the old days in New York, Marty and I were the only two people who would rent a 16mm copy of the film. Every time I found it was out I knew that he had it and each time he wanted it he knew who had it! So that made us buddies.

I explained to the father that he needed to develop a connection to his son, he bemoaned, “But he won’t even let me in his room. If he won’t say a word to me, how am I supposed to connect?” “You start from the ‘as is’ of the situation,” I explained. “What does he do on his computer?” “He studies and plays video games.” “Then this is how you connect—by showing an interest in a video game he really enjoys and inviting him to play with you.” This is how you witness a child’s reality. “But I hate video games. They bore me.” “It’s not about what excites you, but how to engage with your child. When he sees you are genuinely interested in interacting with him and not just looking for a way to change him, he’ll begin to open up. But let me warn you, it will take time. You’ll have to build trust one brick at a time. To do this, you can’t let his rejection of you trigger you. See it as part of the process. It will help if you stay in touch with the fact he’s only showing you how he has felt for many years.” Children aren’t naturally closed off. On the contrary, they are open and willing to share themselves as long as it feels safe to do so. Children want us to see their inherent goodness, regardless of their external behavior at a particular moment. They delight in assurance their misbehavior won’t faze us. To accept them unconditionally is what it means to witness our children.

Many autism experts believe daily living skills, such as managing finances, need to be explicitly taught to people on the autism spectrum. Everything most nonautistic people pick up as they go along—how to shop, catch a bus, cook, clean, or manage money—are skills that are difficult for me to acquire simply by assimilation. I need a book, a video, or someone to explain and show me how to do it. There’s a perception that anyone with average or above-average intelligence will naturally pick up these skills. Strangely, intelligence seems to have little to do with it, and one study even found that problems of this kind are especially prominent in those autistic people with greater cognitive abilities.

When it comes to people we admire, it is in our nature to be selective with information, to load with personal associations, to elevate and make heroic. That is especially true after their deaths, especially if those deaths have been in any way untimely and/or shocking. It is hard to hold onto the real people, the true story. When we think of the Clash, we tend to forget or overlook the embarrassing moments, the mistakes, the musical filler, the petty squabbles, the squalid escapades, the unfulfilled promises. Instead, we take only selected highlights from the archive-the best songs, the most flatteringly-posed photographs, the most passionate live footage, the most stirring video clips, the sexiest slogans, the snappiest soundbites, the warmest personal memories-and from them we construct a near-perfect rock 'n' roll band, a Hollywood version of the real thing. The Clash have provided us with not just a soundtrack, but also a stock of images from which to create a movie we can run in our own heads. The exact content of the movie might differ from person to person and country to country, but certain key elements will remain much the same; and it is those elements that will make up the Essential Clash of folk memory. This book might have set out to take the movie apart scene by scene to analyse how it was put together; but this book also believes the movie is a masterpiece, and has no intention of spoiling the ending. It's time to freeze the frame. At the very moment they step out of history and into legend: the Last Gang In Town.

In their book Warrior Lovers, an analysis of erotic fiction by women, the psychologist Catherine Salmon and the anthropologist Donald Symons wrote, "To encounter erotica designed to appeal to the other sex is to gaze into the psychological abyss that separates the sexes.... The contrasts between romance novels and porn videos are so numerous and profound that they can make one marvel that men and women ever get together at all, much less stay together and successfully rear children." Since the point of erotica is to offer the consumer sexual experiences without having to compromise with the demands of the other sex, it is a window into each sex's unalloyed desires. ... Men fantasize about copulating with bodies; women fantasize about making love to people. Rape is not exactly a normal part of male sexuality, but it is made possible by the fact that male desire can be indiscriminate in its choice of a sexual partner and indifferent to the partner's inner life--indeed, "object" can be a more fitting term than "partner." The difference in the sexes' conception of sex translates into a difference in how they perceive the harm of sexual aggression. ... The sexual abyss offers a complementary explanation of the callous treatment of rape victims in traditional legal and moral codes. It may come from more than the ruthless exercise of power by males over females; it may also come from a parochial inability of men to conceive of a mind unlike theirs, a mind that finds the prospect of abrupt, unsolicited sex with a stranger to be repugnant rather than appealing. A society in which men work side by side with women, and are forced to take their interests into account while justifying their own, is a society in which this thick-headed incuriosity is less likely to remain intact. The sexual abyss also helps to explain the politically correct ideology of rape. ... In the case of rape, the correct belief is that rape has nothing to do with sex and only to do with power. As (Susan) Brownmiller put it, "From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ... Brownmiller wrote that she adapted the theory from the ideas of an old communist professor of hers, and it does fit the Marxist conception that all human behavior is to be explained as a struggle for power between groups. But if I may be permitted an ad feminam suggestion, the theory that rape has nothing to do with sex may be more plausible to a gender to whom a desire for impersonal sex with an unwilling stranger is too bizarre to contemplate. Common sense never gets in the way of a sacred custom that has accompanied a decline of violence, and today rape centers unanimously insist that "rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust--it's about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist's goal is domination." (To which the journalist Heather MacDonald replies: "The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it's not reinstatement of the patriarchy.")

A door to a long-awaited game-world has opened for those who found its key. This includes Dan Harvester, a guy who lives in a run-down apartment with his cat and runs a gaming channel. He's almost through playing and testing VR games, but is this his one last chance to - really - level-up? What can it promise to him, and its first 'Beta-pioneers'? 'Fountellion' is a nature-world full of artificial life that mimics the laws of 'the Source', our own nature with its force of evolution. It promises to be more than a 'survival experience', for there are six 'Insights' scattered and every player can find their own path to them. How much will Dan be changed? There is only one way to find out: experience and tune in to his 'avalogs'. For only by completing them together with fragments from its development, can you too discover the vision and legacy of 'Fountellion'.

I Have Seen Bengal’s Face - Poem by Jibanananda Das Autoplay next video I have seen Bengal’s face, that is why I do not seek Beauty of the earth any more: I wake up in the dark And see the dawn’s magpie-robin perched under the parasol-like huge leaf Of the fig tree – on all sides I see mounds of leaves of Black plum – banyan – jackfruit – oak – pipal lying still; Their shadows fall on the spurge bushes on zedoary clumps; Who knows when Chand near Champa from his madhukar boat Saw such oaks – banyans – gamboge’s blue shades Bengal’s beauty incomparable. Behula too someday floating on raft on Gangur’s water – When the fullmoon of the tenebrous twelfth night died on the river’s shoal – Saw countless pipals and banyans beside the golden corn, Alas, heard the tender songs of shama – and one day going to Amara. When she danced like a torn wagtail in Indra’s court Bengal’s river field, wild violets wept at her feet like anklet bells.

Look around you, piglet. What do you see? Same thing you see in the mirror—fat, weak, lazy slugs. The gene pool so diluted that you can barely recognize these pale blobs as human, all their juice watered down. We did this to ourselves, piglet. Back before you and me were born, all the politicians got scared about all the crime, and all the wars, so they pumped everybody full of antidepressants and soy and estrogen, trying to dull that fire, that natural fire that’s supposed to burn inside all of us. They gave all the men porn and video games, to soak up their conqueror instincts. Worked like a charm—crime went way down, rape went way down, pregnancy went way down. And the only price was they turned all the men into fat little toothless blobs and the girls into arrogant, squealing little piglets, like you. Puttin’ that fire out forever, that natural fire that comes from the balls. The fire that built this world. Well, I’m here to tell you, there are still some men left. So no, there’s not gonna be no negotiation. The lion don’t negotiate with the gazelle.” He

Bitcoin was in theory and in practice inseparable from the process of computation run on cheap, powerful hardware: the system could not have existed without markets for digital moving images; especially video games, driving down the price of microchips that could handle the onerous business of guessing. It also had a voracious appetite for electricity, which had to come from somewhere - burning coal or natural gas, spinning turbines, decaying uranium - and which wasn't being used for something arguably more constructive than this discovery of meaningless hashes. The whole apparatus of the early twenty-first century's most complex and refined infrastructures and technologies was turned to the conquest of the useless. It resembled John Maynard Keynes's satirical response to criticisms of his capital injection proposal by proponents of the gold standard: just put banknotes in bottles, he suggested, and bury them in disused coal mines for people to dig up - a useless task to slow the dispersal of the new money and get people to work for it. 'It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.

I think Americans of my generation can recognise that the horrible old white people of the silent and boomer generations where victims themselves, and that’s why they continue to perpetuate harm on to other people, however, the disgusting nature of white supremacy is to take the original pain of abuse and amplifie it to terrifying degrees onto other people. The entire world is full of people of all backgrounds were victims of abuse but we didn’t run off and join the Nazi party like my grandpa’s siblings because of it. We didn’t cause more destruction from this initial destruction. Or did we? When I see a video of some old white boomer going absolutely apeshit racist on an innocent bystander at the gas station or on the subway, I see this look in their eyes that is familiar to me. It’s the look I’ve seen in the early moments my mother had while beating me, during the rage of it before she broke out with laughter or crying. People who are not white didn’t have the option of joining a political party formed around their supremacy to inflict their pain on to someone else who didn’t look like them, so they took that harm and inflicted it on themselves and their own people. The victim is the perpetrator in a sense that the energy needs to go somewhere, and sometimes it goes inside rather than outside.

[…] fantasy does not exist comfortably with reality. It has a natural tendency to realise itself: to remake the world in its own image. The harmless wanker with the video-machine can at any moment, turn into the desperate rapist with a gun. The 'reality principle' by which the normal sexual act is regulated is a principle of personal encounter, which enjoins us to respect the other person, and to respect, also, the sanctity of his body, as the tangible expression of another self. The world of fantasy obeys no such rule, and is governed by monstrous myths and illusions which are at war with the human world — the illusions, for example, that women wish to be raped, that children have only to be awakened in order to give and receive the intensest sexual pleasure, that violence is not an affront but an affirmation of a natural right. All such myths, nurtured in fantasy, threaten not merely the consciousness of the man who lives by them, but also the moral structure of his surrounding world. They render the world unsafe for self and other, and cause the subject to look on everyone, not as an end in himself, but as a possible means to his private pleasure. In his world, the sexual encounter has been 'fetishised', to use the apt Marxian term, and every other human reality has been poisoned by the sense of the expendability and replaceability of the other.

I wanted to be Feinberg's student, but I didn't know how to go about it. Since it was premature for formal arrangements and since I was naturally reticent and shy, I simply began to greet him very politely whenever our paths crossed. Graduate school was a small community. In corridors and elevators and on campus, I was soon running into Feinberg several times a day, always giving him a polite hello and a nice smile. He would reciprocate similarly with a sort of nervous curling of the lips. As time passed, this limbo of flirtatious foreplay continued unabated. I could never find the courage to broach the question of being his student; I supposed I must have hoped it would just happen wordlessly. Every time I saw him I smiled; every time I smiled he bared his lips back at me with greater awkwardness. Our facial manipulations bore increasingly less resemblance to anything like a real smile; each of our reciprocated gestures was a caricature, a Greek theatrical mask signaling friendliness. One day, on about the fifth intersection of our paths on that particular day, I could stand it no longer. I saw him heading towards me down one of the long dark, old-fashioned Pupin corridors, and immediately turned towards the nearest stairwell and went up one floor to avoid him. Having succeeded at this once, I was compelled to do it repeatedly. Soon I was moving upstairs or downstairs to another floor as soon as I saw him approaching, like the protagonist in some ghastly version of the video game Lode Runner.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

Hello,” she says. “My name is Amanda Ritter. In this file I will tell you only what you need to know. I am the leader of an organization fighting for justice and peace. This fight has become increasingly more important--and consequently, nearly impossible--in the past few decades. That is because of this.” Images flash across the wall, almost too fast for me to see. A man on his knees with a gun pressed to his forehead. The woman pointing it at him, her face emotionless. From a distance, a small person hanging by the neck from a telephone pole. A hole in the ground the size of a house, full of bodies. And there are other images too, but they move faster, so I get only impressions of blood and bone and death and cruelty, empty faces, soulless eyes, terrified eyes. Just when I have had enough, when I feel like I am going to scream if I see any more, the woman reappears on the screen, behind her desk. “You do not remember any of that,” she says. “But if you are thinking these are the actions of a terrorist group or a tyrannical government regime, you are only partially correct. Half of the people in those pictures, committing those terrible acts, were your neighbors. Your relatives. Your coworkers. The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature itself--or at least what it has become.” This is what Jeanine was willing to enslave minds and murder people for--to keep us all from knowing. To keep us all ignorant and safe and inside the fence. There is a part of me that understands. “That is why you are so important,” Amanda says. “Our struggle against violence and cruelty is only treating the symptoms of a disease, not curing it. You are the cure. “In order to keep you safe, we devised a way for you to be separated from us. From our water supply. From our technology. From our societal structure. We have formed your society in a particular way in the hope that you will rediscover the moral sense most of us have lost. Over time, we hope that you will begin to change as most of us cannot. “The reason I am leaving this footage for you is so that you will know when it’s time to help us. You will know that it is time when there are many among you whose minds appear to be more flexible than the others. The name you should give those people is Divergent. Once they become abundant among you, your leaders should give the command for Amity to unlock the gate forever, so that you may emerge from your isolation.” And that is what my parents wanted to do: to take what we had learned and use it to help others. Abnegation to the end. “The information in this video is to be restricted to those in government only,” Amanda says. “You are to be a clean slate. But do not forget us.” She smiles a little. “I am about to join your number,” she says. “Like the rest of you, I will voluntarily forget my name, my family, and my home. I will take on a new identity, with false memories and a false history. But so that you know the information I have provided you with is accurate, I will tell you the name I am about to take as my own.” Her smile broadens, and for a moment, I feel that I recognize her. “My name will be Edith Prior,” she says. “And there is much I am happy to forget.” Prior. The video stops. The projector glows blue against the wall. I clutch Tobias’s hand, and there is a moment of silence like a withheld breath. Then the shouting begins.

Television* means ‘to see from a distance’. The desire in man to do so has been there for ages. In the early years of the twentieth century many scientists experimented with the idea of using selenium photosensitive cells for converting light from pictures into electrical signals and transmitting them through wires. The first demonstration of actual television was given by J.L. Baird in UK and C.F. Jenkins in USA around 1927 by using the technique of mechanical scanning employing rotating discs.However, the real breakthrough occurred with the invention of the cathode ray tube and the success of V.K. Zworykin of the USA in perfecting the first camera tube (the iconoscope) based on the storage principle. By 1930 electromagnetic scanning of both camera and picture tubes and other ancillary circuits such as for beam deflection, video amplification, etc. were developed. Though television broadcast started in 1935, world political developments and the second world war slowed down the progress of television. With the end of the war, television rapidly grew into a popular medium for dispersion of news and mass entertainment. Television Systems At the outset, in the absence of any international standards, three monochrome (i.e. black and white) systems grew independently. These are the 525 line American, the 625 line European and the 819 line French systems. This naturally prevents direct exchange of programme between countries using different television standards.Later, efforts by the all world committee on radio and television (CCIR) for changing to a common 625 line system by all concerned proved ineffective and thus all the three systems have apparently come to stay. The inability to change over to a common system is mainly due to the high cost of replacing both the transmitting equipment and the millions of receivers already in use. However the UK, where initially a 415 line monochrome system was in use, has changed to the 625 line system with some modification in the channel bandwidth. In India, where television transmission started in 1959, the 625-B monochrome system has been adopted.

I DON'T WANT to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately-that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups. You don't even take pleasure in looking at nature photographs these days. Oh, they can be just as pretty as always, but don't they make you feel increasingly ... anxious? Filled with more trepidation than peace? So what's the point? You see the picture of the baby condor or the panda munching on a bamboo shoot, and your heart just sinks, doesn't it? A picture of a poor old sea turtle with barnacles on her back, all ancient and exhausted, depositing her five gallons of doomed eggs in the sand hardly fills you with joy, because you realize, quite rightly, that just outside the frame falls the shadow of the condo. What's cropped from the shot of ocean waves crashing on a pristine shore is the plastics plant, and just beyond the dunes lies a parking lot. Hidden from immediate view in the butterfly-bright meadow, in the dusky thicket, in the oak and holly wood, are the surveyors' stakes, for someone wants to build a mall exactly there-some gas stations and supermarkets, some pizza and video shops, a health club, maybe a bulimia treatment center. Those lovely pictures of leopards and herons and wild rivers-well, you just know they're going to be accompanied by a text that will serve only to bring you down. You don't want to think about it! It's all so uncool. And you don't want to feel guilty either. Guilt is uncool. Regret maybe you'll consider. Maybe. Regret is a possibility, but don't push me, you say. Nature photographs have become something of a problem, along with almost everything else. Even though they leave the bad stuff out-maybe because you know they're leaving all the bad stuff out-such pictures are making you increasingly aware that you're a little too late for Nature. Do you feel that? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you've decided you're just not going to attend this particular party.

Martha would come over every week and check on Mia and work with her on relaxation and breathing exercises to prepare for the natural labor. Jenny was on board with the natural thing too, so of course she and Mia dragged Tyler and me to the Bradley Birthing Method classes. It was hysterical; we had to get in all kinds of weird poses with the girls while they mimicked being in labor. We would massage their backs while they were perched on all fours, moaning. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done is contain my laughter during those classes. Mia was the freakin’ teacher’s pet because she was taking it so seriously. Right around the third class, they showed us a video of a live birth. I had nightmares for a week after that. Tyler and I agreed that we had to find a way to get out of going to the classes. We hadn’t mutually agreed on a plan, so during the fifth class, Tyler took it upon himself and used his own bodily gifts to get us into a heap of trouble. Tyler is lactose intolerant, and he has to take these little white tablets every time he eats cheese. The morning of the class, he stopped by the studio with a half-eaten pizza. I didn’t even think twice about it until that night in class during our visualization exercises when this god-awful, horrendous odor overtook our senses. At first everyone kept quiet and just looked around for the source. There wasn’t a sound to accompany the lethal attack, so everyone went into investigation mode, staring each other down. Mia began to gag. I heard Jenny cry a little behind us. Finally when I turned toward Tyler, I noticed he had the most triumphant glimmer in his eyes. I completely lost my shit. I was rolling around, laughing hysterically. Mia grabbed the hood of my sweatshirt and pulled me to my feet. “Outside, now!” She was scowling as she dragged me along. When we passed Tyler, she pointed to him angrily. “You too, joker.” Mia and Jenny pressed us up against the brick wall outside and then gave us the death stare, both of them with their arms crossed over their blooming bellies. They whispered something to each other and then turned and walked off, arm in arm. We followed. “Come on, you guys, it was funny.” Jenny stopped dead in her tracks and turned. She jabbed her index finger into my chest and said, “Yes, it is funny. When you’re five! Not when you’re in a room full of pregnant women. Do you know how sensitive our noses are?” I shrugged. “It wasn’t me.” “Oh, I know he’s a child,” she said but wouldn’t even look at Tyler. “And you are too, Will, for encouraging it.” Mia was glaring at me with a disappointed look, and then she shook her head and turned to continue down the street. Jenny caught up and walked away with her. “God, they’re so sensitive,” I whispered to Tyler. “Yeah, I kinda feel bad.” Without turning around, Mia yelled to us, “You guys don’t have to come anymore. Jenny and I can be each other’s partners.” I turned to Tyler and mouthed, “It worked!” I had a huge smile on my face. Tyler and I high-fived. “Why don’t you guys go celebrate? I know that’s what you wanted,” Jenny yelled back as they made a sharp turn down the sidewalk and down the stairs to the subway. “Nothing gets past them,” Tyler said

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. This also applies to us, bipedal apes. Ever since our ancestors swung from tree to tree, life in small groups has been an obsession of ours. We can’t get enough of politicians thumping their chests on television, soap opera stars who swing from tryst to tryst, and reality shows about who’s in and who’s out. It would be easy to make fun of all this primate behavior if not for the fact that our fellow simians take the pursuit of power and sex just as seriously as we do. We share more with them than power and sex, though. Fellow-feeling and empathy are equally important, but they’re rarely mentioned as part of our biological heritage. We would much rather blame nature for what we don’t like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like. As Katharine Hepburn famously put it in The African Queen, ”Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” This opinion is still very much with us. Of the millions of pages written over the centuries about human nature, none are as bleak as those of the last three decades, and none as wrong. We hear that we have selfish genes, that human goodness is a sham, and that we act morally only to impress others. But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry? This is how empathy starts. Not very sophisticated perhaps, but we can be sure that a newborn doesn’t try to impress. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them ”animals”. But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being ”humane”. We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves. It wasn’t until an ape saved a member of our own species that there was a public awakening to the possibility of nonhuman humaneness. This happened on August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion. That Binti’s behavior caused such surprise among humans says a lot about the way animals are depicted in the media. She really did nothing unusual, or at least nothing an ape wouldn’t do for any juvenile of her own species. While recent nature documentaries focus on ferocious beasts (or the macho men who wrestle them to the ground), I think it’s vital to convey the true breadth and depth of our connection with nature. This book explores the fascinating and frightening parallels between primate behavior and our own, with equal regard for the good, the bad, and the ugly.

It was discussed and decided that fear would be perpetuated globally in order that focus would stay on the negative rather than allow for soul expression to positively emerge. As people became more fearful and compliant, capacity for free thought and soul expression would diminish. There is a distinct inability to exert soul expression under mind control, and evolution of the human spirit would diminish along with freedom of thought when bombarded with constant negative terrors. Whether Bush and Cheney deliberately planned to raise a collective fear over collective conscious love is doubtful. They did not think, speak, or act in those terms. Instead, they knew that information control gave them power over people, and they were hell-bent to perpetuate it at all costs. Cheney, Bush, and other global elite ushering in the New World Order totally believed in the plan mapped out by artificial intelligence. They were allowing technology to dictate global control. “Life is like a video game,” Bush once told me at the rural multi-million dollar Lampe, Missouri CIA mind control training camp complex designed for Black Ops Special Forces where torture and virtual reality technologies were used. “Since I have access to the technological source of the plans, I dictate the rules of the game.” The rules of the game demanded instantaneous response with no time to consciously think and critically analyze. Constant conscious disruption of thought through television’s burst of light flashes, harmonics, and subconscious subliminals diminished continuity of conscious thought anyway, creating a deficit of attention that could easily be refocused into video game format. DARPA’s artificial intelligence was reliant on secrecy, and a terrifying cover for reality was chosen to divert people from the simple truth. Since people perceive aliens as being physical like them, it was decided that the technological reality could be disguised according to preconceptions. Through generations of genetic encoding dating back to the beginning of man, serpents incite an innate autogenic response system in humans to “freeze” in terror. George Bush was excited at the prospects of diverting people from truth by fear through perpetuating lizard-like serpent alien misconceptions. “People fear what they don’t know anyway. By compounding that fear with autogenic fear response, they won’t want to look into Pandora’s Box.” Through deliberate generation of fear; suppression of facts under the 1947 National Security Act; Bush’s stint as CIA director during Ford’s Administration; the Warren Commission’s whitewash of the Kennedy Assassination; secrecy artificially ensured by mind control particularly concerning DARPA, HAARP, Roswell, Montauk, etc; and with people’s fluidity of conscious thought rapidly diminishing; the secret government embraced the proverbial ‘absolute power that corrupts absolutely.’ According to New World Order plans being discussed at the Grove, plans for reducing the earth’s population was a high priority. Mass genocide of so-called “undesirables” through the proliferation of AIDS4 was high on Bush’s agenda. “We’ll annihilate the niggers at their source, beginning in South and East Africa and Haiti5.” Having heard Bush say those words is by far one of the most torturous things I ever endured. Equally as torturous to my being were the discussions on genetic engineering, human cloning, and depletion of earth’s natural resources for profit. Cheney remarked that no one would be able to think to stop technology’s plan. “I’ll destroy the planet first,” Bush had vowed.

In 2017, Fiverr ran a similar ad to NEC’s “Power Lunch,” but missing the lunch. In this one, a gaunt twenty-something stares dead-eyed into the camera, accompanied by the following text: “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow-through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.” Here, the idea that you would even withhold some of that time to sustain yourself with food is essentially ridiculed. In a New Yorker article aptly titled “The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death,” Jia Tolentino concludes after reading a Fiverr press release: “This is the jargon through which the essentially cannibalistic nature of the gig economy is dressed up as an aesthetic. No one wants to eat coffee for lunch or go on a bender of sleep deprivation—or answer a call from a client while having sex, as recommended in [Fiverr’s promotional] video.”17 When every moment is a moment you could be working, power lunch becomes power lifestyle.

Moa mock hunt reconstructed by Augustus Hamilton Giant Haast's eagle attacking New Zealand moa by John Megahan Auroch bull restoration by DFoidl Dodo at Oxford University Museum of Natural History by BazzaDaRambler Elephant bird - author unknown Bluebuck by le Vaillant 1781 Great Auk reconstruction at Kelvingrove, Glasgow by Mike Pennington Quagga photograph - Regent's Park ZOO, London by F. York Stephens Island wren by John Gerrard Keulemans Honshu wolf from The Chrysanthemum Magazine February 1881

Deep learning techniques are used when data features are numerous and there is a lack of domain understanding to identify and understand them. This data is typically complex, such as images, videos, or voice recordings. For example, an image contains an indefinite amount of data features (e.g., points, edges, shapes, or objects), and some are relevant to the problem being solved, but others are not. Deep learning is used to solve problems such as image classification, natural language processing, and speech recognition.

When I think about the history of slavery and racism in this country, I think about how quick we are to espouse notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path. I think of how decades of racial violence have shaped everything we see, but sometimes I find myself forgetting its impact on those right beside me. I forget that many of the men and women who spat on the Little Rock Nine are still alive. I forget that so many of the people who threw rocks at Dr. King are still voting in our elections. I forget that, but for the arbitrary nature of circumstance, what happened to Emmett Till could have happened to my grandfather. That the children who threw food at my grandmother and called her a nigger are likely bouncing their own great-grandchildren on their laps. That the people who lynched a man in my grandfather's town may have had children who inherited their parents' hatred. That the woman who stood alongside the Obamas to officially open the National Museum of African American History and Culture was the daughter of a man born into slavery. My grandfather's grandfather was born into slavery, while my grandmother's grandfather was born at its edge. We tell ourselves that the most nefarious displays of racial violence happened long ago, when they were in fact not so long ago at all. These images and videos that appall our twenty-first-century sensibilities are filled with people who are still among us. There are people still alive today who knew and held and loved people who were born into slavery. I do not misunderstand the language of progress. Though I realize that I do not yet have all the words to discuss a crime that is still unfolding. But I do know that spending the day with my grandparents in a museum documenting the systemic and interpersonal violence they witnessed the hand that beat them and the laws that said it was okay reminded me that in the long arc of the universe, even the most explicit manifestations of racism happened a short time ago.

I do have an interest in dissidents. My mother believes 5G may harm us, and I think she’s silly. But what of the nonconformist who warned back in 1940 that cigarettes kill? What of the contrarian who said the CIA was spying on Martin Luther King, Jr.? I mean, I’ve seen no evidence that 5G or the Covid vaccines are harmful. But have I done that research myself? No. I just trust the media would tell me if they were. My media. Whatever media my mom is consuming, they’re quoting “research, studies.” They’re slinging medical articles and YouTube videos of doctors saying that mRNA vaccines kill. A month before our road trip, she sent me one of these videos. It’s a clip of a longer talk, but even the clip is twelve minutes long. “Something to consider,” she wrote in the subject line. “Doctor calls out deadly vaccine!” Twelve minutes is annoyingly long for something I instinctively discredit, but short enough to give it a go. So I do. It’s a doctor on a stage with a PowerPoint. He has studies and graphs and lists of ingredients in tiny fonts and words like “embryonic stem cells.” I write my mom a long response. “OK I’m six minutes in and here are my thoughts: he’s using a lot of technical science speak that is above my pay grade. And so, what I’m doing is I’m trusting the lingo of an expert.

Most living entities and systems on this planet obviously do not live by the Western human clock (though some, like the crows who memorize a city's daily garbage truck route, do of course adapt to the timing of human activities). To watch a brown creeper as it inches up and down, peering into crevices and extracting bugs with its little dentist beak, is thus a way of catching a ride out of the grid and toward a time sense so different that it is barely imaginable to us. In Jennifer Ackerman's book The Bird Way, I learned that the male black manakin, a South American songbird, can do somersaults so fast that a human can see them only in slowed-down video. Some birdsong contains notes that are sung too quickly or are too high-pitched for us to hear. Veeries, a species related to the American robin, can predict hurricanes months in advance and adjust their migration route accordingly, and no one currently knows how. Birds own bodies and their movements are an entanglement of time and space: If a loon is in the higher latitudes, it's summer, and the bird is mostly black with a striking pattern of white stripes. If the same loon is near my studio in Oakland, it's winter, and the bird is almost unrecognizably different, a dull grayish brown.

How long does it take to Learn Freelancing? How long it takes to learn freelancing depends on what you're learning, how you start freelancing, and how hard you try to learn it. Learning something requires more willpower and concentration than any effort. The sooner you continue to learn to work with focus, the sooner you will succeed. And the slower you go, the longer it will take you to learn the task. So if you want to build a career online as a professional freelancer then you must spend extra time on it. Freelancing for Beginners: If you are new to the freelancing sector, there are a few things you need to know. For example: What is data entry? What is outsourcing? Web design key etc. Having a basic understanding of these things will make it much easier for you to learn freelancing. Although freelancing has complex tasks as well as some simple ones. But it is very few and low incomes. There are many new freelancers who want to earn freelancing with mobile. Their statement is, "I don't need so much money, only 4-5 thousand taka will do". In their case, I would say that you learn data entry work. You can earn that amount of money in this work. But if you choose freelancing just to do this job then I would say you are doing it wrong. Because this data entry work is very long, you need to work for 7-8 hours. And if you dream of only 4-5 thousand rupees by working 7-8 hours, then my suggestion for you is that you should not do this work but get tutoring. At least it will be best for you. Freelancing requires you to have big dreams and the passion to make them come true. Misconceptions about Freelancing: There is no substitute for a good quality computer or a good quality laptop to learn and master freelancing professionally. This way you can practice and learn very quickly without any hassle. Many people think that by looking at the monitor and pressing the keyboard, they become freelancing and can earn lakhs of rupees a month. In fact, those who think so cannot be entirely blamed. Many of us get lured by such mouthwatering advertisements as "opportunity to earn lakhs per month with just one month course" and waste both our precious time and money by joining bad unprofessional coaching centers. Why is it not possible to learn freelancing in just one month even in one year? It is clear proof that glittering does not make gold. There are thousands of jobs in freelancing, each job is different, and each job takes a different amount of time to learn. So it is very difficult to comment on how long it takes to learn freelancing. Be aware in choosing the right Freelancing Training Center: But whatever you do, don't go for an online course of Rs 400-600-1200. Because it will also lose the willpower you have to learn to freelance. If you have to do this type of bad course today, then do a government freelancing course or you can take practical training from an organization called "Bhairab ​​IT Zone" for a nominal fee. Here hands-on training is provided by professional freelancers using tools in free, premium, and upgraded versions. Although there are many ways or mediums to learn freelancing or outsourcing. E.g. Outsourcing Learning Books, Youtube Video Tutorials, Seminars etc. Either way, some learn to swim in a day and some in a week. To become a good swimmer one must continue swimming for a long time. Not everyone has the same brain capacity or stamina. Humans are naturally different from one another. The same goes for freelancing. You might learn the ins and outs of freelancing within 6-7 months, it might take another 1-2 years. No matter how long it takes to learn, you need to work twice as long to become proficient at it. But with hard work, willpower, and determination you can make any impossible possible. Please visit Our Blogging Website to Read More Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing.

Animals accumulate living facts relevant to their everyday lives: Bees remember the location of a good dandelion field, dogs remember the path through the woods that leads to their favorite pond, and crows remember which human fed them in a park. But humans accumulate a seemingly endless number of useless (i.e., dead) facts: the distance to the moon (384,400 km), the true identity of Luke Skywalker’s father (Darth Vader), or which Paula Abdul video starred Keanu Reeves (“Rush Rush”). Our heads are full of dead facts—both real and imagined. Most of them will never be of any use to us. But they are the lifeblood of our why specialist nature as they help us to imagine an infinite number of solutions to whatever problems we encounter—for good or ill.

in mounting its push into the South China Sea, Chinese cartographers have adopted a trick from digital photography, where many cameras can change their display ratios, or “aspect,” from square to rectangular to panoramic. In China’s new cartography, its north-south dimension is emphasized. This has the effect of making the South China Sea appear to hang from the southern coastline like an enormous blue banner. Almost magically, it begins to look more or less like a natural extension of the country and less marginal or incidental as it did on the older, more familiar maps. To complete the trick, Beijing has mounted an unrelenting campaign of domestic propaganda instructing the Chinese people that the waters the world identifies today as the South China Sea—a name introduced by Europeans in the nineteenth century—indisputably belong to China. In 2015, one of the most striking examples of this was a promotional video for the People’s Liberation Army Navy that was reportedly shared online more than one hundred million times in the first week after its release. “China’s oceanic and overseas interests are developing rapidly,” it said. “Our land is vast. But we will not yield a single inch of our frontiers to foreigners.

YouTube video: "Can a person become Jewish?" By JihadiJew 2:27 … Another question people ask is how is it possible that you have Jews who have no interest in Judaism as a religion who may not even believe in God, are nevertheless are fully Jewish, or considered fully Jewish, and then you have converts who have to commit themselves to this rigorous lifestyle of commandments. The best I can answer that is to kind of think of Jewishness as a kind of national identity. We’re called Am Yisrael – the Jewish People, related to the Arabic word Ummah, people. So as part of this membership you get citizenship. Well, one way you get citizenship is the way I got citizenship in the United States – I was born. I was born in the United States and I received my citizenship not because I knew anything about America, just because I was born here. I don’t need to know anything about America. I don’t need to know the constitution. I don’t need to know American History. I just have to be born here. On the other hand, if I wanted to become a naturalized citizen, I’d have to study the constitution, I’d have to study history and I’d have to commit myself to the ideals of the United States. The same way with converts. In order to become a citizen of the Jewish people, well then you have to commit yourself to the ideals of the Jewish people and you’d have to be willing to observe what the Jewish people are supposed to observe…

The way I think of ASD,” she said, “is this: Most people, as they grow up, assimilate the norms of social behavior naturally, through osmosis, if you will. That was not the case for me or for many with ASD. It was as though I’d been dropped into a complex video game but without a manual. I still am unclear on how neurotypicals pick up on those norms. My brain is wired differently, and fortunately, my parents picked up on it very early. They remember the day they read through a list of Asperger’s symptoms, saying, ‘Yes!’ to each. They took me to a psychologist right away. That early diagnosis gave me a tremendous advantage.

Historically, humans have engaged in activities that have natural stopping cues—no more apples on the tree, no more ale in the barrel, the end of a chapter, the end credits. Platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Netflix have systematically eradicated stopping cues—similar to casinos, which deliberately have no hard angles, only one continuous space to keep you moving through it, on to the next wager. Netflix has become an endless show; TikTok, an endless video.

As ego-driven individuals, we love to think that the universe is all about us. That we are at the center and everything that happens, happens because the universe has some divine plan for us. We are compelled to believe that the universe personally cares about us. Otherwise, what is the point? How can we care about the universe if it does not care about us? But just because we need it to care, does not mean that it does. The universe or a god, as some might view it, is not a human, nor does it function like one. It does not experience emotion or empathy. And it does not care about the ways in which humans perceive and experience what it is. It functions objectively. And therefore, fundamentally, things do not happen for a reason. They happen merely because of the arbitrary alignments of time and space. Mere coincidence. But then why does it so often seem that when things happen, they happen for a reason? That every time something happens to us, it leads to some purpose in our life. That even when bad things happen to us, they can end up leading us to good things. Certainly, there must be a reason why the cliché ”everything happens for a reason,” is so widely popular. The real reason is because of the resilience of human nature and the power of our imagination. Things appear to happen for a reason not because the universe or a god-like figure is watching over us, playing us like a prewritten video game, but because as humans, we have the power to MAKE things happen for a reason. When things happen to us, we assimilate them into our life and give them a reason for being there. We perceive the alignments of time and space and attach narratives and purpose to the things that occur. We are the writers of our own story. For every moment we experience, we have the ability to write our own meaning. For every conflict we face, we have the ability to write our own resolution. We can learn adapt, and create purpose out of the randomness of life within the universe. And in my opinion, that is even more comforting than the idea that things happen for some ulterior reason.

Essentially, life is a game. There are natural and manmade laws that serve as rules. There is a beginning and an end. There is a game board we play on that we call planet Earth. And there are decisions and moves that we make that determine where and how we move on the board. Of course, we all want to win. Some of us do, and some of us don’t. But that begs the question, how DOES one win? Unlike a normal game, there is no time afterlife for us to bask in and enjoy a victory. And so, if we wish to truly experience winning the game of life, we must frame our definition of how we win accordingly so that we win while the game is still in play. Winning the game of life is not predicated merely by the quantity of material successes that we have accumulated by the end of it. Sure, it is enjoyable and important to acquire things within the game of life, but the accumulation of things like wealth, material excess, fame, or status tends to easily be confused as the ultimate endgame. But they are not. They are just parts of the game. And furthermore. Each win of this kind is generally short-lived. It is just like how winning a board game, video game, or sports game might feel good when it occurs and for a little while after, but the feeling soon fades and you return to your normal state. And so it is important that the state that you return to is a victory in it of itself. In the case of the game of life, not only is the sense of fulfillment from material wins short-lived, but the accumulation of material points does not matter much at the end of it. These points don’t go anywhere with you when you are dead and gone. Instead, it is about how much you enjoyed the game of pursuing the points in the first place. Ironically, you truly win the game of life when you realize and embrace that it IS a game. When you become aware that against all odds, you were somehow rendered into this existence and are now able to play and enjoy the most enthralling, sophisticated, and entertaining game ever to exist. A game that is so complex and uncertain that you can never completely predict what’s going to happen next. A game that is always updating. A game that you can come up with rules for, change existing ones, unlock new levels, and uncover hidden settings. And the quality of your life experience truly maximizes when you realize that you have already won by being able to do any of this.

Not everyone is naturally artistic like Angie. Those of us who aren’t as creative need to take our hobbies where we can find them, whether that’s doing crafts, or playing video games, or whatever else interests us. Running, watching movies, fantasy football. Anything can be a hobby if we invest enough of ourselves in it.

An official Taliban gazette published a week before the September 11 attacks clarified the following list of items formally banned in the Islamic Emirate: “The pig itself; pork; pig fat; objects made of human hair; natural human hair; dish antennas; sets for cinematography and sound recording projectors; sets for microphotography, in case it is used in the cinema; all instruments which themselves produce music, such as the piano, the harmonium, the flute, the tabla, the tanbour, the sarangi; billiard tables and their accessories; chess boards; carom boards; playing cards; masks; any alcoholic beverage; all audio cassettes, video cassettes, computers and television which include sex and music; centipedes; lobsters (a kind of sea animal); nail polish; firecrackers; fireworks (for children); all kinds of cinematographic films, even though they may be sent abroad; all statues of animate beings in general; all sewing catalogues which have photos of animate beings; published tableaus (photos); Christmas cards; greeting cards bearing images of living things; neckties; bows (the thing which strengthens the necktie); necktie pins.

Animal awareness is the perfect carrier of propaganda - it is the ideal facilitator of animal conditioning, while human awareness is the only civilized answer. Let me show you how animal conditioning through propaganda works. I'll mention a word, and you'll tell me what's the first thing that comes to your mind. And the word is - "terrorism". Here, the first thing a white american nationalist will think of, is "arabs". Ask an indian hindu nationalist the same question, and their first thought would be "pakistan". In the same way, israeli zionists would automatically associate the word terrorism with palestine. Like it or not, that's animal nature. Every moment you are bombarded with materials that have no relation to truth and humanity, as far as the civilized mind could see. Through cinema, through video games, through news - propaganda is everywhere. And no, I am not talking about some grand conspiracy. Apes, who still cannot look past the color of skin and language of tongue, do not have the brains to orchestrate some grand scheme of manipulation - all they can do is, simply peddle the same old rotten narrative of hate and fanaticism repeatedly, and the rest is taken care of by the primitive survival instinct of the ape brain. So, what's the way out? Simple - start using that grand instrument you carry on your shoulders, which you call a brain - driven by an actual civilized craving for uplift and illumination.

Our bodies, by their very nature, resist control, a fact that always has felt paradoxically triumphant when I encounter it. We invent bustles and girdles and exercise videos and cabbage diets and sizing schemes, but our bodies have their own agenda, and so they rarely obey us. Some people want their butt to be big, some people want their butt to be small. But a butt will, for the most part, always remain what it is. As the human mind tries to hammer a body into submission- tries to create meaning, tries to change its shape and appearance, tries to make it something it is not and cannot be- the human body stubbornly refuses to oblige.

Christmas Field Guide: Holly: Varied plants of the genus Ilex. Typically only female holly plants bear red fruit, and only if a male is within an unchaste 25 foot radius.

go into each platform and do some research on what these cohorts naturally watch and engage with. With platforms’ search capabilities constantly improving, you can type in something like “girl dad” in the search bar and find videos relevant to that group.

The first twenty-minute pocket of The 20/20/20 Formula requires that you Move. Simply put, doing some sweaty exercise first thing every morning will revolutionize the quality of your days. The second pocket encourages you to Reflect for twenty minutes. This segment is designed to help you reaccess your natural power, boost self-awareness, dissolve your stress, fuel your happiness and restore your inner peace in an era of acute overstimulation and excessive activity. And you’ll round out this sixty-minute Victory Hour of personal fortification with twenty minutes centered around ensuring that you Grow, whether that means investing some time reading a book that will improve your understanding of how the best lives were made or an article that will refine your professional prowess or listening to an audio session on how the virtuosos accomplish their unusual results or watching an educational video that will show you how to lift your relationships or increase your finances or deepen your spirituality.

I could read it so you don’t have to?” she offers, but I’m already halfway through. I start to read aloud. “ ‘I had this vision for creating a platform that would help people to connect and coalesce around the things that mattered most to them. It was a natural extension of what I’d been doing for years. People used to call me a humanist spirit guide—I guess that’s what I’m bringing to WAI now, just on a larger stage.’ “He doesn’t even mention us. Doesn’t say anything about how Jules and I dragged him kicking and screaming into this. I wanted to create a platform. Cyrus just wanted to baptize cats.” “To be fair, the Cat Baptism is one of the most shared rituals,” Destiny says, trying to lighten the tone. “Eight hundred thousand videos and counting.” I keep going. “ ‘I’m attracted to the solitary life, Jones says. You can imagine him in a monastery, although he’d have to cut off that halo around his head. In addition to creating a social network that millions of people are turning to for meaning and community, he is also taking care of his employees—he has just kicked off a mentorship program to give the women on his team the support they need to thrive in their roles.’ ” Destiny tells me to stop reading. “It’s just bullshit.” I take a shaky deep breath. “That’s my mentorship program,” I whisper. “Cyrus is telling them what he wants to hear. You and I both know that.” I’m stammering now, but I keep going. “ ‘He’s otherworldly but handsome in an almost comical way. His sentences are long, and when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder, where is this going? But he always manages to bring whatever he’s saying to a satisfying conclusion. Everything he says is mysterious and somehow obvious at the same time.’ ” At least this one is funny. I allow Destiny to laugh briefly. I get to the last line. “ ‘I have to say, I’m developing something of a crush.’ ” “Oh, for God’s sake, another woman in love with Cyrus. Take a number, sister.” Destiny leans over, reads the byline. “George Milos. Guess Cyrus appeals to all genders.” As we get up to leave, she says, “I don’t think Cyrus is a bad person. He’s just basking in a sea of adoration, and it makes him think more of himself than he should.” “Where does that leave me?” “You have a tough gig. No one wants to be married to the guy everyone thinks is going to save the world.

Like other sport hunters, too, Mr. Scruton carries his moral relativism a step further in his constant appeals to experience. To "understand" hunting and the delights of the "substantial minority" of people who enjoy it, we must hunt, submerge ourselves in the raw, choiceless passion of it all. We, too, might then know that sense of "homecoming to our natural state." Of course, this is an argument equally available to enthusiasts of bull-fighting, cockfighting, bear-baiting, hare coursing, crush videos, or, for that matter, pornography in general. Since when do we have to indulge in vice before we may adjudge it as such?

Overcrowding works in a different way for creators than for viewers. For creators, the problem becomes—how do you stand out? How do you get your videos watched? This is particularly acute for new creators, who face a “rich get richer” phenomenon. Across many categories of networked products, when early users join a network and start producing value, algorithms naturally reward them—and this is a good thing. When they do a good job, perhaps they earn five-star ratings, or they quickly gain lots of followers. Perhaps they get featured, or are ranked highly in popularity lists. This helps consumers find what they want, quickly, but the downside is that the already popular just get more popular. Eventually, the problem becomes, how does a new member of the network break in? If everyone else has millions of followers, or thousands of five-star reviews, it can be hard. Eugene Wei, former CTO of Hulu and noted product thinker, writes about the “Old Money” in the context of social networks, arguing that established networks are harder for new users to break into: Some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they’ve earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can’t be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game. It’s not that the existence of old money or old social capital dooms a social network to inevitable stagnation, but a social network should continue to prioritize distribution for the best content, whatever the definition of quality, regardless of the vintage of user producing it. Otherwise a form of social capital inequality sets in, and in the virtual world, where exit costs are much lower than in the real world, new users can easily leave for a new network where their work is more properly rewarded and where status mobility is higher.75 This is true for social networks and also true for marketplaces, app stores, and other networked products as well. Ratings systems, reviews, followers, advertising systems all reinforce this, giving the most established members of a network dominance over everyone else. High-quality users hogging all of the attention is the good version of the problem, but the bad version is much more problematic: What happens, particularly for social products, when the most controversial and opinionated users are rewarded with positive feedback loops? Or when purveyors of low-quality apps in a developer platform—like the Apple AppStore’s initial proliferation of fart apps—are downloaded by users and ranked highly in charts? Ultimately, these loops need to be broken; otherwise your network may go in a direction you don’t want.

Second error: Freud assumed that things experienced are things understood. In accordance with that assumption, he believed that a memory trace existed, somewhere in the mind, that accurately represented the past, like an objective video recording. These would be reasonable presumptions, if our experience was simply a series of objectively real and self-evident events transmitted through our senses, thought about, evaluated, and then acted upon. If this was all true, traumatic experience would be accurately represented in memory, even when pushed out of awareness by unconscious mechanisms (or conscious—but Freud presumed the former) because of its understood but terrible nature. However, neither reality nor our processing of reality is as objective or articulated as Freud presupposed.

We don’t think there’s anything wrong with mega or micro, video or cyber, gathered or scattered, house or weekend church. Each of those experiences is fine for those who want what is being delivered. In other words, if someone leads or partakes in any form of church and genuinely feels it is driving them naturally toward the life and mission of God, then for them, that is good news. But for many, it is not, and other options need to be offered. For us, in the brave city camp, we have come to call teaching and gathering settings “tables,” just like every other “table” in the ecosystem. (More on this later.) Teaching and gathering are important concepts and practices, but no more important than any other aspect of life.

Let’s imagine that one of the two-dimensional creatures was able to switch planes and see the other one and see that there was some truth in both of them. Then they could flip-flop between perspectives at different times or they could say we just need to hold paradox. It’s both and neither, which mostly means giving up on making sense of reality. Or they say it’s a middle path that’s somewhere between the two. And a middle path in two dimensions is like a rounded rectangle where you kind of do something that’s a little bit circle-ish and a little bit rectangle-ish which isn’t even any true part of what a cylinder is. And the thing is that they’re just at too low of a dimensional perspective to properly understand the nature of the cylinder which is actually a very simple thing. It doesn’t require holding paradox. It doesn’t require a middle path in that way. And it’s because when we think of a middle path oftentimes we’re thinking of extremes on left or right in a gradient. But sometimes the two different perspectives aren’t on a gradient on a single axis. They’re orthogonal to each other. And the reason why this is kind of actually an interesting example is because perception itself, a perspective on something defined by perception is inherently a reduction of the information of the thing. My perspective of it is going to be a lot less total information than the actual thing is. So I can look at the object from the east side, or the west, or the top, or the north side, or the inside, microscopically, telescopically. They’ll all give me different information. None will give me the entirety of the information about the situation. And so there is no all-encompassing perspective that gives me all of the information about really almost any situation. And so what this means is that reality itself is trans-perspectival. It can’t be captured in any perspective. So multiple perspectives have to be taken, all of which will have some part of the reality, some signal. There may also be distortion. I may be looking at the thing through a fisheye lens or through a colored lens that creates some distortion. But then let’s say, I’m looking at a building and the picture, the 2D picture from the east and from the west side and from inside a particular room and the aerial view are all, obviously, very different pictures and it’s because the 3D complex building actually can’t be seen in a 2D process. So I could take a lot of pictures and I could seam them together into a kind of video that moves through the building. Now by having a video, I added the dimension of time and I go back to kind of the right dimensionally to be able to understand the thing. But that’s not a perspective. That’s a lot of perspectives that we’re able to put together. So why does this matter?

In a video that went viral on TikTok, a male argus pheasant displayed his dazzling plumage to a female, who seemed to look off to the side. Viewers laughed at her apparent disinterest, not knowing that she was looking right at him with her side-facing visual field.

Even in the equations that had been formulated to describe electromagnetism, there is no natural directionality to the interactions of particles; the equations look the same going both directions. If you looked at a video of atoms interacting, you could play it backward and you wouldn’t be able to tell which was correct. It is only in the macroworld of objects, people, planets, and so on, the world governed by entropy, that causation appears to unfold in a single direction. The second law of thermodynamics describes the increasing disorder in the universe at macroscales and is often seen as equivalent to the one-way arrow of time. More and more physicists over the past few decades, sensitive to the nondirectionality that seems to rule at the micro or quantum level, have begun to question the no-teleology rule. Recall that the tiny particles making up the matter and energy of the physical universe are really like worms or strings snaking through the block universe of Minkowski spacetime. Their interactions, which look to us a bit like tiny balls colliding on a billiard table, are from a four-dimensional perspective more like threads intertwining; the twists and turns where they wrap around each other are what we see as collisions, interactions, and “measurements” (in the physicists’ preferred idiom). Each interaction changes information associated with those threads—their trajectory through the block universe (position and momentum) as well as qualities like “spin” that influence that trajectory. According to some recent theories, a portion of the information particles carry with them actually might propagate backward rather than forward across their world lines. For instance, an experiment at the University of Rochester in 2009 found that photons in a laser beam could be amplified in their past when interacted with a certain way during a subsequent measurement—true backward causation, in other words.8 The Israeli-American physicist Yakir Aharonov and some of his students are now arguing that the famous uncertainty principle—the extent to which the outcome of an interaction is random and unpredictable—may actually be a measure of the portion of future influence on a particle’s behavior.9 In other words, the notorious randomness of quantum mechanics—those statistical laws that captured Jung’s imagination—may be where retrocausation was hiding all along. And it would mean Einstein was right: God doesn’t play dice.*23 If the new physics of retrocausation is correct, past and future cocreate the pattern of reality built up from the threads of the material world. The world is really woven like a tapestry on a four-dimensional loom. It makes little sense to think of a tapestry as caused by one side only;

Facebook Marketing Course By taking a Facebook marketing course, you can quickly create a means of income on a huge platform like Facebook. This Facebook marketing course covers a large part of digital marketing. When we talk about social media, we mean Facebook as the biggest online social media platform. Because every month on average 2.96 billion people around the world actively use Facebook and 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger. So think about how much of a platform you are getting for free to promote your business. Most of us don't know about Facebook's numerous features and tools, or even if we do, we don't know how to use them. Although it is unbelievable, it is true that if we learn the use of those tools, we can easily increase the sales of our website, Facebook page, or e-commerce site many times. Why learn Facebook Marketing? The interface we usually see on Facebook is only 20% of Facebook. The remaining 80 percent are in various subdomains of Facebook. In our country, no one can use 99 percent of Facebook. It cannot be said that more than 5% of the mangoes are used by the common people. And spammers can use 10 percent. So today I will discuss how to earn from Facebook by using the maximum of Facebook. In 2019, Facebook earned $40 million from Facebook ads alone, after paying content creators, bloggers, publishers, and developers. Which has doubled till now. If the calculation includes the amount Facebook pays to those who create content and make videos on Facebook, the amount would be $1 billion. Have you ever wondered why Facebook gives them so much money? The reason is propaganda. As a result of this campaign, the business expanded. That is not in the words - "propaganda is expansion"! The objective of this Facebook campaign and marketing is to increase sales. The higher the sales, the higher the profit. That's why every company now hires its own social media marketing manager to promote its business and increase sales. A social media marketing manager's salary ranges from around $500 to $3,000. In other words, Facebook has facilitated the way to do business in social media as well as to get a job. How many Types of Facebook Marketing? To know how to use Facebook's features and tools, you need to take a Facebook Marketing Course. Facebook marketing is generally of two types, namely – free Facebook marketing and paid Facebook marketing. In this case, you can do both types of courses. Facebook free and paid marketing is used according to the type of business. Free Facebook Marketing Marketing or advertising on Facebook without spending any money is called Free Facebook Marketing. Let's give an example – “You open a Facebook page for your business, then give it a nice name according to the type of work you do. Then continue to post about your products every day, as well as request your relatives and friends to like your page. Also, ask them to share your page. Give them a little flattery so that they stay by your side and help grow your page by liking-commenting-sharing, etc etc”. But you don't have to spend any money to do them. This is called Free Facebook Marketing. Paid Facebook Marketing On Facebook, those posts that we see under a post (Sponsored) are called paid Facebook marketing. Every company wants everyone to know about their products. So they use paid Facebook marketing in addition to using free Facebook promotion. It is possible to reach very selective customers by using this paid Facebook marketing. For example, "You want your product's customers to be located within the Dhaka Banani area and for both men and women, and you can also give an age limit that people between so and so age will see my ad or post". It is natural that you will not get the benefits that you can enjoy in the case of paid Facebook marketing in the case of free. This is why you need to spend money on paid Facebook marketing.

I took a black and white photograph, which I also posted on Instagram. Her New Balance shoes and her feet crossed, hanging as she sat atop the pile of aluminum chairs, against the backdrop of the many legs of the chairs shining in the street lights in contrast to her dark shoes and leggings, were so captivating. There was a lightness in the way she sat there with her crossed legs dangling, as if she was perched on a cloud and it was the most natural thing as she was my angel. I was still unsure if she really existed or if I had only made her up with Pinto cat one night. It was all like a lucid dream. I was so glad for us and for us becoming rich soon too. I was so glad I could provide her with a future in Europe. I was so glad we would be rich and happy and we would be able to make all our dreams come true and travel the world freely together. I can show her Italy and Hungary and Europe. We can pick where do we want to live or make family. I knew all my life, all my work had led to this girl, this moment, and this future. Ours. She started to rap in Spanish in the Rioplatense dialect as I started to record her. „Loco, loco…” - she was so cute, it sounded like she had learned it on the streets of Buenos Aires, skipping school. She was amazing - so young, so true, so natural and pure and cute. I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to make kids with her. With only her. Nobody else. By the wall of the church and the bar tables, there were a bunch of metal mobile railings with the Ajuntamiento de Barcelona logo in the middle of each of them. I told Martina to squat down to the level of the Ajuntamiento sign, and before I could finish my sentence, she was already doing it. She posed with the mobile railings, making a funny, cool and happy face while squeezing the Ajuntamiento logo between two of her fingers and pointing at it with her other hand, as if we were mocking the authorities of the Ajuntamiento. She was reading my mind. Like she knew magic. She was such a good girl. She was so pretty, smart and sexy. She was smiling, biting her lower lip, excited, turned on, and in love, I thought, looking like a bunny, or like Whitney Houston on the Brazilian live concert video, so I began to call her “Bunny”. I showed her how Whitney was smiling the same way. I was so blind to see the connection. (“The Cocaine Queen”) I was so much in love with her, so under her spell, I just really wanted her to be the One, I guess. I explained to her that the Camorra was one of my costumers and they had a club close by too and they were taking away other people's coffeeshops, menacing their lives and their families'. I explained to her that we were going to do all demolition and remodeling without any permit, without telling a word to anyone. I told her that we would lie to the residents of the building above us about what we were going to do there for months and months. I told her that she must keep it as our secret. She was nodding happily and she seemed happy that I trusted her. I explained everything to her, I told her about Rachel and Tom and I signing the founding document at Amina's office at the beginning of the same year, 2013. She seemed to understand the weight of all I told her and the reasons why I told her about it all, so she would know, so she wouldn't make a mistake saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked her to pay attention to her surroundings in Barcelona from then on, as there were a lot of criminals, and she was a very pretty girl - not only my girlfriend. She seemed to take it as a privilege to be my girlfriend, and she seemed eternally happy, as was I. I told her that she was the only person I fully trusted. I wanted to send the video of Martina rapping on WhatsApp to Adam, but Martina told me I shouldn't because it was late and, at the end, Adam was my boss. “Yeah but he is not really my boss, in Spain, I am the boss.

We’ve seen the emergence of a gift economy in digital products such as software, text, images, and video; the natural course of events would see this pattern extend to APM product-design files, leading (aside from the cost of input materials) to a gift economy in physical objects (but within what mandated constraints?).

registered email address and went global in 2007. Twitter split off onto its own platform and went global in 2007. Airbnb was born in 2007. In 2007, VMware—the technology that enabled any operating system to work on any computer, which enabled cloud computing—went public, which is why the cloud really only took off in 2007. Hadoop software—which enabled a million computers to work together as if they were one, giving us “Big Data”—was launched in 2007. Amazon launched the Kindle e-book reader in 2007. IBM launched Watson, the world's first cognitive computer, in 2007. The essay launching Bitcoin was written in 2006. Netflix streamed its first video in 2007. IBM introduced nonsilicon materials into its microchips to extend Moore's Law in 2007. The Internet crossed one billion users in late 2006, which seems to have been a tipping point. The price of sequencing a human genome collapsed in 2007. Solar energy took off in 2007, as did a process for extracting natural gas from tight shale, called fracking. Github, the world's largest repository of open source software, was launched in 2007. Lyft, the first ride-sharing site, delivered its first passenger in 2007. Michael Dell, the founder of Dell, retired in 2005. In 2007, he decided he'd better come back to work—because in 2007, the world started to get really fast. It was a real turning point. Today, we have taken another

Our article, ‘In The Absence of the Sacred: The Marketing of Medical Transgenderism and the Survival of the Natural Child’, addressed the issue of medicalizing children’s subjective identities for profit, in conjunction with a technological assault on children, via cell phones, social media, video games and pornography.

But can you imagine if the very first time that you fell after pulling yourself up on that coffee table, a voice came thundering down at you, berating you for falling? “I knew you couldn't do it! You fell, you idiot! I can’t believe you fell. Everyone else is walking, but not you. You are a pathetic little crawler and you always will be!” No, quite the opposite! Toddlers are met with lavish praise at each minor progression, even steps in the general direction of progress. When the little one pulls herself up, she gets applause. Mom grabs the video camera and calls the grandparents. Can you imagine how different—and by different, I mean better—this journey would be if with every advancement you made, every small, wobbly step you took in the direction toward Hunger Directed Eating (however imperfect it was), you lavished praise, delighted wonderment, and encouragement upon yourself?

A serial killer is a rare and specific criminal profile. In males the motives’re sexual in nature usually, or nonsexual sadism. And while there’s ritualistic behavior, that’s limited in most cases to binding or arranging the victims in certain ways or leaving fetishes at the scene or taking trophies, postmortem. The behavior doesn’t rise to the Composer’s level of elaborate staging—the videos, the noose, the music. He’s a multiple perpetrator.” Silence

Mouthbrooding is a common form of behavior in cichlids. Typically, it refers to post-spawning behavior in which parents (usually females) hold their brood of fertilized eggs inside their mouths until they hatch and sometimes even after that. This provides the eggs and fry with a haven from predators, a point commonly portrayed in crowd-pleasing nature videos that depict young fish darting back into their parent’s mouth at the first sign of danger. Conspicuously missing from these lighthearted reports is the fact that parents holding a mouthful of eggs usually eat a considerable portion of them, and sometimes the entire brood. Also destined for the digital equivalent of the cutting room floor are shots showing male cichlids fertilizing the eggs in the females’ mouths, always a difficult topic to explain during family TV time. Mouthbrooders

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.

When Mathematics unfold through Origamis, when video games target Medicine and Education, when architecture embraces nature, when we defy gravity, when physics dance, and dance clubs play Einstein, when we stop playing war, when TV starts saying something, when we produce without wasting, when engineering meets humanity’s primary needs, when all of these are not just casualties, but a standard we all live UP to: Then we’ll know. I’ll know: we really live in the 21st century

Here in Alpha City, we have a common saying: “What we call ‘sky’ is merely a figment of our narrative.” The most dreamy-eyed among us seem to adorn themselves and their aspirations in that proverb and you’ll see it everywhere: in advertisements on the sides of streetcars and auto-rickshaws, spelled out in studs and rhinestones on designer jackets, emblazoned in the intricate designs of facial tattoos—even painted on city walls by putrid vandals and inspiring street artists. There is something glorious about kneading out into the doughy firmament the depth and breadth of one’s own universe, in rendering the contours of a sky whose limits are predicated only upon the bounds of one’s own imagination. The fact of the matter is that we cannot see the natural sky at all here. It is something like a theoretical mathematical expression: like the square-root of ‘negative one’—certainly it could be said to have a purpose for existing, but to cast eyes upon it, in its natural quantity, would be something akin to casting one’s eyes upon the raw elements comprising our everyday sustenance. How many of us have even borne close witness to the minute chemical compounds that react to lend battery power to our portable electronics? The sky is indeed such a concealed fixture now. It is fair to say that we have purged our memories of its true face and so we can only approximate a canvas and project our desires upon it to our heart’s dearest fancy. The most cynical among us would ostensibly declare it an unavoidable tragedy, but perhaps even these hardened individuals could not remember the naked sky well enough to know if what they were missing was something worthwhile. Perhaps, it’s cynical of me to say so! In any case, we have our searchlights pointed upwards and crisscrossing that expanse of heavens as though to make some sensational and profane joke of ourselves to the surrounding universe. We beam already video images of beauty pageants and dancing contests with smiling mannequins who look like buffoons. And so, the face of space cloaks itself behind our light pollution—in this respect, our mirrored sidewalks and lustrous streets do little to help our cause—and that face remains hidden from us in its jeering ridicule, its mocking laughter at this inexorable farce of human existence.

Persson did not create Minecraft because he wanted to create a billion-dollar company; he loved video games and kept his day job while developing it. When the game soared in popularity, he started a company, Mojang, with some of the profits, but kept it small, with just 12 employees. Even with zero dollars spent on marketing and no user instructions, Minecraft grew exponentially, flying past the 100 million registered user mark in 2014 based largely on word of mouth.2 Players shared user-generated extras like modifications (“mods”) and custom maps with each other, and the game caught on not only with children but their parents and even educators. Still, Persson avoided the valuation game, refusing an investment offer from former Facebook president Sean Parker. Finally, he and his co-founders sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, a fortune built on one man’s focus on creating something that people loved.3 On the other end of the spectrum is Zynga, one of the fastest startups ever to reach a $1 billion valuation.4 The social game developer had its first hit in 2009 with FarmVille. Next came Zynga’s partnership with Facebook that turned into a growth engine. The company began trading on the NASDAQ in December 2011 and had 253 million active users per month as late as the first quarter of 2013.5 Then the relationship with Facebook ended and the wheels started coming off. Flush with IPO cash, Zynga started exhibiting all the symptoms of ego-driven, grow-at-any-cost syndrome. They moved into a $228 million headquarters in San Francisco. They began hastily acquiring companies like NaturalMotion, Newtoy, and Area/Code. They infuriated customers by launching new games without sufficient testing and filling them with scripts that signed players up for unwanted subscriptions and services. When customer outrage went viral, instead of focusing on building better products, Zynga hired a behavioral psychologist to try to trick customers into loving its games.6 In a 2009 speech at Startup@Berkeley, CEO Mark Pincus said, “I funded [Zynga] myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which . . . I downloaded it once — I couldn’t get rid of it. We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.”7 By the spring of 2016, Zynga had laid off about 18 percent of its workforce and its share price had declined from $14.50 in 2012 to about $2.50.

The world can be a better place. The problems that plague are manmade. However, the people able to elevate human living, those few with the resources, influence, technology, time, and power, are preoccupied with something else, or they benefit from the status quo. Nothing else can explain their lack of action. Or perhaps, they lack the vision. If the latter is correct, the solution is simple, read my work. But if the former is so, which I think is true, then there is little hope for the common people. Unless of course, God intervenes and pushes the reset button to this video game called life. Or the people affected by the backwardness mobilize and retake their natural rights.

If we direct our intention toward doing (when possible) that which seems meaningful right now and noticing that any outcome is enough, we might discover a terribly obvious yet effective strategy for perpetual contentment. Of course to do this—to open ourselves up to changing and living according to the meaning of the present month or moment—is a frightening proposition. If we do, we will surely witness our tastes and whims recycle and transform. We will watch as our personalities modify in subtle ways. And although a small number of passions might stay with us throughout our lives, many more will certainly fall away or be replaced. In other words, to admit that in this second I am not a static being is to admit that I will be something different tomorrow, something unknown a year from now, and possibly something unrecognizable to myself in a decade. This notion is uncomfortable because it forces us to countenance the passing of time, the fading of past selves, our eventual physical death. To change is to vacate the past and move ever-closer to the end of our story. It’s no wonder that we bury our proverbial talons in the interests, attributes, memories, and tendencies of our past selves and insist that “who we are” has long been established. But what might we become if we accept that, in the grammar of the universe, our nature is verb-like, transitory, ever-moving? We might become anything. The possibilities are endless and exciting. It seems natural to hold tightly onto the past. We tend to feel that if don’t have the past, we don’t have anything. Our pasts provide all of the context with which we are equipped to navigate the present. Without our memories and stories, we would indeed be directionless and alone. But it seems that we often overcompensate, desperately clinging to the “good old days”, trying to relive them in our minds, and simultaneously attempting to freeze the present moment, to capture the past before it becomes the past. This latter point can be plainly observed in our modern tendency to photograph even the most mundane of moments and to record hours of video that we’ll never revisit. But if we spend significant amounts of time trying to immortalize and live vicariously through the past, we may relinquish a measure of ability to see the possibilities of the present and future. We may cease to fully capitalize on the surrounding opportunities for novel experience, reflection, and appreciation. We may eschew the potential to become a marvelously different-yet-somehow-still-the-same version of ourselves.

One of the early stage AI companies Google purchased is DeepMind, based in London. In 2015 researchers at DeepMind published a paper in Nature describing how they taught an AI to learn to play 1980s-era arcade video games, like Video Pinball. They did not teach it how to play the games, but how to learn to play the games—a profound difference. They simply turned their cloud-based AI loose on an Atari game such as Breakout, a variant of Pong, and it learned on its own how to keep increasing its score. A video of the AI’s progress is stunning. At first, the AI plays nearly randomly, but it gradually improves. After a half hour it misses only once every four times. By its 300th game, an hour into it, it never misses. It keeps learning so fast that in the second hour it figures out a loophole in the Breakout game that none of the millions of previous human players had discovered. This hack allowed it to win by tunneling around a wall in a way that even the game’s creators had never imagined. At the end of several hours of first playing a game, with no coaching from the DeepMind creators, the algorithms, called deep reinforcement machine learning, could beat humans in half of the 49 Atari video games they mastered.

You can nourish the development of your child’s imagination by providing nourishing images from stories the child hears and limiting images the child receives from television, computer games, videos, and movies.

Hello,” she says. “My name is Amanda Ritter. In this file I will tell you only what you need to know. I am the leader of an organization fighting for justice and peace. This fight has become increasingly more important—and consequently, nearly impossible—in the past few decades. That is because of this.” Images flash across the wall, almost too fast for me to see. A man on his knees with a gun pressed to his forehead. The woman pointing it at him, her face emotionless. From a distance, a small person hanging by the neck from a telephone pole. A hole in the ground the size of a house, full of bodies. And there are other images too, but they move faster, so I get only impressions of blood and bone and death and cruelty, empty faces, soulless eyes, terrified eyes. Just when I have had enough, when I feel like I am going to scream if I see any more, the woman reappears on the screen, behind her desk. “You do not remember any of that,” she says. “But if you are thinking these are the actions of a terrorist group or a tyrannical government regime, you are only partially correct. Half of the people in those pictures, committing those terrible acts, were your neighbors. Your relatives. Your coworkers. The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature itself—or at least what it has become.” This is what Jeanine was willing to enslave minds and murder people for—to keep us all from knowing. To keep us all ignorant and safe and inside the fence. There is a part of me that understands. “That is why you are so important,” Amanda says. “Our struggle against violence and cruelty is only treating the symptoms of a disease, not curing it. You are the cure. “In order to keep you safe, we devised a way for you to be separated from us. From our water supply. From our technology. From our societal structure. We have formed your society in a particular way in the hope that you will rediscover the moral sense most of us have lost. Over time, we hope that you will begin to change as most of us cannot. “The reason I am leaving this footage for you is so that you will know when it’s time to help us. You will know that it is time when there are many among you whose minds appear to be more flexible than the others. The name you should give those people is Divergent. Once they become abundant among you, your leaders should give the command for Amity to unlock the gate forever, so that you may emerge from your isolation.” And that is what my parents wanted to do: to take what we had learned and use it to help others. Abnegation to the end. “The information in this video is to be restricted to those in government only,” Amanda says. “You are to be a clean slate. But do not forget us.” She smiles a little. “I am about to join your number,” she says. “Like the rest of you, I will voluntarily forget my name, my family, and my home. I will take on a new identity, with false memories and a false history. But so that you know the information I have provided you with is accurate, I will tell you the name I am about to take as my own.” Her smile broadens, and for a moment, I feel that I recognize her. “My name will be Edith Prior,” she says. “And there is much I am happy to forget.” Prior.

When you watch the videos of soul singers dancing across the stage in that era, with their lye-straighten haired and that side part, what crosses your mind?   When did you go “natural” or do you still process your hair? 

The core idea is that for an information processing system to be conscious, it needs to be integrated into a unified whole that can't be decomposed into nearly independent parts. This means that all parts need to compute jointly with lots of information about each other-otherwise there would be more than one independent consciousness, such as in a room full of people or, perhaps, in the two brain halves of a patient whose connecting corpus callosum has been cut out. If there are fairly independent parts that are too simple, then these won't be conscious at all, like the independent pixels of a video camera.

The Circumcision Decision If you have a baby boy, chances are you’ll be asked whether or not you want to circumcise him in the hospital. Most of us have inherited a vague sense that circumcision is somehow cleaner or healthier. But these are myths. We’ll share a few facts to jumpstart your research. - The significance of the infant’s pain is often overlooked in circumcision. Hospitals use painful Gomco clamps that sever nerve endings, and most docs make the cut without anesthesia. - Many infants go into shock as a result of the pain they experience in circumcision, and the breastfeeding relationship may be compromised as a result. - The circumcised penis is no cleaner than an intact penis, and requires far more care during the healing process. - “...[P]rofessional societies representing Australian, Canadian, and American pediatricians do not recommend routine circumcision of male newborns.” ~American Medical Association What if you plan to circumcise for reasons of Jewish faith? In Jewish circumcisions, - Boys are circumcised eight days after birth, when natural levels of Vitamin K are the highest. - Anesthetic is traditionally given (in the form of a tiny amount of wine and/or numbing agents). - Mohels (traditional circumcisers) don’t use painful skin clamps. Overheard… After reading up on circumcision, I knew I didn’t want to go through with it. The first reason was medical: the AAP doesn’t recommend routine circumcision. My second reason was emotional. It went against my mama bear instinct to protect my baby. Convincing dad was more difficult. He wanted to have his son like him. (I asked him if he and his dad compared their penises; the answer was no.) My husband watched videos of the procedure being done but had to stop them before they were over. He’d thought it was a simple snip of the ‘extra’ skin, but it’s not. The foreskin is actually fused to the head of the penis, like a fingernail to a nail bed. We took our baby home from the hospital the way he was born, and we haven’t regretted it. ~Lani, mom to Bentley Want to learn more? Check out the Circumcision Resource Center online, a helpful resource filled with medical and psychological literature for those questioning the practice.

The industrial world of pipelines relies heavily on push. Consumers are accessed through specific marketing and communication channels that the business owns or pays for. In a world of scarcity, options were limited, and getting heard often sufficed to get marketers and their messages in front of consumers. In this environment, the traditional advertising and public relations industries focused almost solely on awareness creation—the classic technique for “pushing” a product or service into the consciousness of a potential customer. This model of marketing breaks down in the networked world, where access to marketing and communication channels is democratized—as illustrated, for example, by the viral global popularity of YouTube videos such as PSY’s “Gangnam Style” and Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” In this world of abundance—where both products and the messages about them are virtually unlimited—people are more distracted, as an endless array of competing options is only a click or a swipe away. Thus, creating awareness alone doesn’t drive adoption and usage, and pushing goods and services toward customers is no longer the key to success. Instead, those goods and services must be designed to be so attractive that they naturally pull customers into their orbit. Furthermore, for a platform business, user commitment and active usage, not sign-ups or acquisitions, are the true indicators of customer adoption. That’s why platforms must attract users by structuring incentives for participation—preferably incentives that are organically connected to the interactions made possible by the platform. Traditionally, the marketing function was divorced from the product. In network businesses, marketing needs to be baked into the platform.

The constant needle and edge in their working relationship is matched by a cloak of secrecy the warring offices throw around their rival operations. Diana had to use all her guile to tease out information from her husband’s office before she flew to Pakistan on her first major solo overseas tour last year. She was due to stopover in Oman where Prince Charles was trying to woo the Sultan to win funding for an architectural college. Curious by nature, Diana wanted to know more but realized that a direct approach to Prince Charles or his senior advisers would receive a dusty response. Instead she penned a short memo to the Prince’s private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard and asking innocently if there was anything in the way of briefing notes she needed for the short stopover in Oman. The result was that, as she was travelling on official Foreign Office business, the Prince was forced to reveal his hand. In this milieu of sullen suspicion, secrecy is a necessary and constant companion. Caution is her watchword. There are plenty of eyes and ears as well as police video cameras to catch the sound of a voice raised in anger or the sight of an unfamiliar visitor. Tongues wag and stories circulate with electrifying efficiency. It is why, when she was learning about her bulimic condition, she hid books on the subject from prying eyes. She dare not bring home tapes from her astrology readings nor read the satirical magazine Private Eye with its wickedly accurate portrayal of her husband in case it attracts unfavourable comment. The telephone is her lifeline, spending hours chatting to friends: “Sorry about the noise, I was trying to get my tiara on,” she told one disconcerted friend.

Some analysts have renamed the welfare state, which obtained basically from about 1945 until in the 1970s, the garrison state. State legitimacy now depends on protection from these threats by targeting of dangerous others. I’ll say more about this in two weeks, but just to repeat what I indicated last week, the idea that the globalized form of capitalism means that decisions about the economic security and welfare of citizens are no longer within the hands necessarily of nation-state governors. To preserve their legitimacy as governors, they need to find a new basis for legitimation. Some people are arguing, and I would agree with much of this, that this is the new basis. The protection from dangerous others. We have endless enemies. Foreign communism morphed into terrorism. We now have a tremendous fear of immigrants and refugees. Witness the recent ban orders, the deportations, the detentions, the demonization of others. We have domestic enemies, people of color, the young, the old, LGBTQ communities, the differently abled, and along with that the militarization of the police and the criminalization of protest, which we’ll talk about in the last couple of weeks. Where is all of this headed? The Pentagon has a very bleak view of the future (see “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity: A Pentagon Video”), which views urban areas (both foreign and domestic) as basically breeding grounds for instability, unrest, and chaos. To think about the kind of underlying view of humanity this way I think comes naturally in some sense out of this very long history of militarization. That is, if you think of yourself as military, then everybody outside is an enemy. This is also what becomes part of the problem of militarizing the police. As the police become increasingly militaristic, the people that they supposedly protect and serve begin to look more and more like the non-police, like the enemy. This is, I think, an extremely dangerous kind of trend that we’re seeing. The forecast that this is the way in which the military will sort of reproduce itself by now being able to respond to these kinds of future threats where the mass of humanity is either an enemy or is in a witting or unwitting cloak for enemies. It’s extremely dangerous. One we should think very carefully about, but this is the Pentagon’s view largely of what that future looks like, and it is, in fact, urban, militarized, and dangerous.

REMEMBER THIS •​Stop deflecting blame. When kids don’t act the way parents want, it’s natural to look for answers that help parents divert responsibility. •​Techno-panics are nothing new. From the book, to the radio, to video games, the history of parenting is strewn with moral panic over things supposedly making kids act in strange ways. •​Tech isn’t evil. Used in the right way and in the right amounts, kids’ tech use can be beneficial, while too much (or too little) can have slightly harmful effects. •​Teach kids to be indistractable. Teaching children how to manage distraction will benefit them throughout their lives.

I was watching a documentary that described a night at Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello. After the meal each night the family, with their guests, would retire into the parlor to drink tea and spend 3-4 hours discussing things they learned or were pondering lately. Without the television or other individualistic electronic means of entertainment I think we’d still do this to avoid boredom. When I first heard about this practice my first thought was, “Oh, that’s what a family does.” I grew up in an age where it was natural to entertain myself or go off with friends but it makes sense that, in the absence of these things, a family would need to learn to interact and really enjoy each other’s company. So 3-4 times per week we have an informal meal followed by what we simply call “family time.” This can be done around the dining room table or the coffee table but it’s been an amazing experience. I begin by asking if anyone learned or had any ideas or questions they’ve been pondering about God. We move from that topic into a more general question like, “Did anyone learn anything today or have something they want to discuss?” We share stories from the day, passages of things we’ve read, watch funny videos or play a family game. At the end we often talk about what’s in store for tomorrow and pray together.