Met geruststellen zijn we sinds de oertijd bezig. De vroegst overgeleverde verhalen draaien om troosten of verklaren. Waar de wereld vandaan komt bijvoorbeeld, of dat onweer niet zozeer een doodeng en grillig natuurverschijnsel is, maar gewoon een moodswing van de dondergod. Dat als je maar goed en vooral volgens de regels leeft, je niets zal overkomen.
The Missing Pages of Laurent Binet’s HHhH - The Millions
“Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, it’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence.”
Iain McGilchrist The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World,
The world we experience–which is the only one we can know–is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it. This implies that there is no simple and single, wholly mind-independent, truth.
If our evolutionary heritage in its development of consciousness limited its capacities to survival and propagation of the species, then much of the so-called ‘super-natural’ world of the noumenal is neither super nor beyond us. We are immersed in a cosmos that our brain and body for the most part filter out, exclude from access what we did not need as a species to survive in jungles, deserts, mountains, etc.
The Sun sometimes runs up to 16 minutes fast in its daily travels across the sky, and sometimes as much as 14 minutes slow, depending on the season. This effect arises from the tilt of the Earth's axis and the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
Maureen Guinness, the late Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, was a vacuous snob whose idea of fun was to turn up at the houses of society hostesses wearing a comedy penis nose, a fart machine carefully hidden between her legs.
hmm it might be me but i think that's pretty funny!
from Rachel Cooke's review in the Observer of Why Not Say What Happened? A book by Ivana Lowell about life inside the Guinness clan.
Wittgenstein’s newly translated notebooks, covering God, integrity and sex
On July 4, 1916, the twenty-seven-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein, picked up his notebook to write down thi dea that the meaning of the world does not lie within it but outside of it.