Cloud storage is paving the way for books that are sold not by title, but by time.

So, digital books. As innovative as they are form-wise and otherwise, it’s striking, business-wise, how tightly they cling to tradition. Whether pre-Gutenberg or post-Bezos, books have been sold pretty much the same way: per unit, object by object, X books for X bucks.

There’s been a good reason for that, of course, which is that books, like clothes or cars or Kindles, are commodities, and creatures of the marketplace. But there’s also a good reason to think that things will soon be changing. In the digital realm, after all, books are no longer objects in the way that clothes or cars or Kindles are objects. They are things, now, only in the most broad and tenuous sense.

Enter Audiobooks.com, Simply Audio Books‘ new book-streaming service. Instead of sending discs of individual audiobooks, Qwikster-style, as Simply Audio Books had been doing since 2003 — and instead ofallotting book credits to customers, as Amazon’s Audible service does — Audiobooks offers unlimited streaming through the cloud. And at a flat membership fee of $25 a month.

What Netflix’s Watch Instantly has done for movies, and what Spotify has done for music, Audiobooks could do for books. The service has the potential to reframe book-buying as a transactional thing, making it less about purchasing an object, and more about purchasing an experience. In fact — convergence! — the monthly unlimited access Audiobooks.com is experimenting with has less in common with, say, Amazon’s approach and more in common with cable TV’s: In a monthly subscription framework, the unit of purchase is the bundle, and vice versa. The price is constant — and, more importantly, unaffected by the content that’s consumed. Whether you watch 20 hours of Parks and Rec each month or 20 minutes of it, you’ll pay the same thing. Because you’re paying, officially, not for content itself, but for the potential to consume it.

Cable’s model is not without its problems, but, from the perspective of incentivized content consumption, it’s incredibly elegant. The bundled subscription removes the pressure points from the purchasing experience, making programming blissfully — and/or horrifically — easy to consume. And making it, more to the point, mindlessly easy to consume. There’s a reason that television is Americans’ mass medium of choice, and only part of it has to do with the obvious awesomeness of Laverne & Shirley.

Books’ transactional logic, however, has been pretty much the opposite of cable’s brain-bucking bundle. Since you’re made to pay for each product individually, you’re made to make each purchasing decision individually. And books, which are pretty expensive relative to the time it takes to consume them, don’t always benefit from the resulting deliberation. (Is a book that you’ll be done with in four hours really worth $26? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.) With book-buying, even online, impulse — the driving force of so many digital dealings — has a hard time breaking through. A price tag is a price tag, even in a one-click world.

And so the book industry, like its counterparts in music and film, has been built on a business model that effectively discourages the mass consumption of its products. Which has been its only option, of course, but which has also meant that books’ core audiences haven’t always been as core as they could be. Book-buying binges (so I’ve heard, from a friend, etc.) can become crazy-expensive, discouraging even the most passionate bibliophiles from getting their bibliofills. This is great for libraries (and for, you know, TV and movie producers); it is significantly less great for booksellers.

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But what if you could re-define books’ value proposition? What if book-buying became less about one-off salesmanship, and more about ongoing membership? What if you didn’t buy books so much as join them?

It’s that kind of wholesale, psychic reframing that Audiobooks’ model is hinting at. And while audiobooks are a special case in that, being audiobooks, they’re especially suited to streaming, it’s easy to see a membership model proving effective for all kinds of digital content, “traditional” e-books very much included. It’s easy to envision a kind of iTunes-in-reverse subscription framework that charges customers not per book, but per month — or, hey, per minute or week or year. Time over tome.

And it’s easy to imagine, furthermore, that shift bringing a new life to books both as consumer goods and as epistemic objects. Book-buying, made blissfully brainless! Reading, unlimited! Netflix’s streaming model — which Amazon, the rumor goes, might soon be imitating — changed the way we relate to movies. Spotify’s streaming changed the way we relate to songs. The cloud is a powerful thing. And the revolution that’s taking place in computing overall — the computer as an object giving way to the computer as a service — is changing our approach to content consumption, as well. As more and more of our stuff moves to the cloud, and as the mechanism of stuff-storage shifts from the download to the stream, the membership-driven library seems more and more feasible. And more and more sensible. And more and more exciting.

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: Rethinking Thinking

If you ask a person when “middle age” begins, the answer, not surprisingly,depends on the age of that respondent. American college-aged students are convinced that one fits soundly into the middle-age category at 35. Respondents who are actually 35, however, would beg to differ with these youngsters. Rather, for them, middle age is still half a decade away, with 40 representing the inaugural year.

Such disagreement over when this term applies—perhaps it’s simply whenever one starts using expressions such as “youngsters” and “young people”—may be an entirely American affair, however. Recently, a large sample of Swiss participants spanning several generations agreed with one another that middle-aged people are those who are between 35 to 53 years of age.

Frankly, however, the precise chronological point at which we formally enter “middle age” is of little importance. What’s much more intriguing are the psychological changes thought to accompany it. (And in fact, based on our species’ average life expectancy today, most people overestimate it—technically, middle age would kick off no later than 32, at least for men.) After all, we’ve all heard of the dreaded “midlife crisis,” but what, exactly, is it? Furthermore, does it even exist as a scientifically valid concept? There’s no question that most people believe that it’s a genuine psychiatric phenomenon. In one study, University of Zurich investigators Alexandra Freund and Johannes Ritter found that 92 percent of their 372 respondents were absolutely convinced that the midlife crisis was real; 71 percent said that they’d even known someone in the throes of one.

My first encounter with this tragic illness was my mother informing me that, “your father is having a midlife crisis” after he suddenly bought a horse and left her for a younger woman (these things were related, but that’s another story). Needless to say, my mother’s diagnosis of my father wasn’t accompanied by tones of sympathy, and I’ve long feared the day when I, too, might inherit this shameful affliction, struck down by a sudden, incurable case of Joe-Shmoe hedonism. The most frequent symptoms of this disease, I gathered from television, were a shiny new convertible (or prize-winning stallion), a toupée, and the unshakable delusion that one is now attractive to twenty-year-old co-eds.

But this popular image of the “midlife crisis” is a far cry from what the scholar Elliott Jacques originally had in mind when he first coined this term back in 1965. Jacques wasn’t especially interested in women’s psychological functioning as they transitioned to midlife, which, he felt, “is often obscured … by the proximity of the onset of changes connected with menopause.” In fact, the “midlife crisis” is still seen today as a distinctively male type of problem, one often lobbed at men by disgruntled women to explain the formers’ selfish, impulsive behaviors. This gender stereotype is interesting in its own right. But what Jacques, a psychoanalyst, sought originally to examine with his notion of the midlife crisis was its relation to creative genius.

According to him, the midlife crisis is such a crisis that many great artists and thinkers don’t even survive it. “I had the impression,” explains Jacques, “that the age of 37 seemed to figure prominently in the death of individuals in this category.” So he decided to crunch the numbers with a “random sample” of 310 such geniuses and, indeed, he discovered that a considerable number of these formidable talents—including Mozart, Raphael, Chopin, Rimbaud, Purcell, and Baudelaire—succumbed to some kind of tragic fate or another and drew their last breaths between the ages of 35 and 39. “The closer one keeps to genius in the sample,” Jacques observes, “the more striking and clear-cut is this spiking of the death rate in midlife.”

Yet for those of you out there still on a golden path to glory—and how many remain ofKundera’s famed immortals it’s impossible to say—the good news is that an early death is by no means inevitable. Basically, argues Jacques, around the age of 35, genius can go in one of three directions. If you’re like that last batch of folks, you either die, literally, or else you perish metaphorically, having exhausted your potential early on in a sort of frenzied, magnificent chaos, unable to create anything approximating your former genius. The second type of individual, however, actuallyrequires the anxieties of middle age—specifically, the acute awareness that one’s life is, at least, already half over—to reach their full creative potential. Before his 38^thbirthday, for example, Bach was just an unusually talented church organist and music tutor; it was only in middle age, and after securing a cantorship in Leipzig, points out Jacques, that Bach’s “colossal achievements as a composer” really began in earnest. Although he’d produced Romeo and Juliet in his early thirties, Shakespeare is thought to have penned Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth all between the ages of 35 and 40. How’s that to make you feel like a sloth?

Finally, the third type of creative genius, says Jacques, is prolific and accomplished even in their earlier years, but their aesthetic or style changes dramatically at middle age, usually for the better. The “spontaneous effusions” that one produces in their late teens and twenties and which are “dictated [only] by the limits of the artist’s physical capacity” becomes more patient and refined. The work of the middle-aged artist is more “a sculptured creativity.” Dante represents the prototypical case here, argues Jacques. He began writing his sombre, philosophical The Divine Comedy at the age of 37, after his banishment from Florence. According to Jacques, The Divine Comedy is the poet’s “first full and worked-through conscious encounter with death”—his works before this reflected a more idyllic worldview.

Jacques also presented several clinical accounts from his therapist office, case studies of everyday men who weren’t part of this glittering pantheon, but who nonetheless were also grappling with the “midlife crisis.” The heart of the matter, Jacques believed, is in the discomfiting realization that one’s remaining time on earth is less than what they’ve already lived. Death is now clearly on “this side” of one’s narrative rather than some faraway, remote, abstract endpoint. (Hence the banal over-the-hill quips often overheard at 40^th birthday parties.) “For the first time in his life,” Jacques notes about the lamentations of one particularly sad middle-aged man, “he saw his future as circumscribed … he would not be able to accomplish in the span of a single lifetime everything he had desired to do. He could only achieve a finite amount. Much would have to remain unfinished and unrealized.”

Insightful as Jacques was, however, the phrase “midlife crisis” didn’t really creep into suburban vernacular as a catchall diagnosis until the late 1970s. This is when Yale’s Daniel Levinson, building on the stage theory tradition of lifespan developmentalist Erik Erikson, began popularizing tales of middle-class, middle-aged men who were struggling with transitioning to a time where “one is no longer young and yet not quite old.” This culminated in his well-known book, The Seasons of a Man’s Life. Levinson felt that midlife crises were actually more common than not and appeared like clockwork between the ages of 40 to 45. For Levinson, such crises were characterized primarily by a stark, painful “de-illusionment” process stemming from the individual’s unavoidable comparison between his youthful dreams and his sobering present reality. For most men, life moves so swiftly that, by the time you look back at what’s happened, you realize you’ve already suffered an irreparable loss of chance and opportunity. This life review causes depression, anxiety, and “manic flight,” a sort of desperate, now-or-never fumbling to experience the pleasures one has long denied oneself and an escape from stagnation.

In any event, how a man resolves this fundamental conflict, Levinson argued, shapes his outlook and adjustment from that point forward. One way to address this tension between storybook ambitions and anticlimactic adult realities is to focus on the bird in hand rather than those still in the bush. Data reveal that many middle-aged adults reformulate their aspirations in the wake of such a life review, gravitating now more toward maintenance goals—essentially, keeping things status quo and safeguarding their future—rather than setting their sights on lofty new dreams. The forty-year-old libertine protagonist in Michel Houellebecq’s Platform, for instance, has become perfectly content with his unglamorous job as a civil clerk; he’s also thoroughly uninspired by political and cultural changes. “It’s not up to me to adopt or invent new attitudes or new affinities with the world,” he reasons. “I gave up all that at the same time I developed a stoop and my face started to tend toward melancholy.” Complacency sounds grim and certainly has a negative ring to it, but you can look at it another way, too. It offers a mental buffer against anxieties tied to unrealizable dreams; it can even thwart potentially ruinous decisions when we’re most vulnerable to making them, such as quitting a hard-won job or leaving one’s family.

In the decades since Jacques and Levinson posited their mostly psychoanalytic ideas of the midlife crisis, a number of more empirically minded psychologists have attempted to validate it with actual data. And with little success. Epidemiological studies reveal that midlife is no more or less likely to be associated with career disillusionment, divorce, anxiety, alcoholism, depression or suicide than any other life stage; in fact, the incidence rates of many of these problems peak at other periods of the lifespan. Adolescence isn’t exactly a walk in the park either—as a teen, I’d worry so much about the uncertainties of my future that I vividly recall envying the elderly their age, since for them, no such uncertainties remained. Actually, old people—at least Swiss old people—aren’t fans of the “storm and stress” of adolescence, either. Freund and Ritter asked their elderly respondents which stage of their lives they’d prefer to return to, if they could. Most said middle age.

The authors conclude that although the male midlife crisis may not be supported by empirical data outside of psychodynamics, the fact that it remains so integral to Western notions of men’s development still gives it currency, since such social scripts—even if they’re not grounded in biologic functioning—can sometimes have dramatic effects. Freund and Ritter propose, therefore, a more “lenient concept” of the midlife crisis than earlier notions allowed. It may not be a “crisis” state per se, they say, but midlife poses clear challenges to people this age. “Because middle adulthood is commonly viewed as the middle of life, the change in future time perspective as the time until death is likely to highlight the limited remaining time for redirecting or correcting one’s personal developmental path.”

That’s sufficiently vague to permit your favorite middle-aged man his well-earned midlife crisis even in the absence of any rigorous empirical data supporting the existence of the construct.

Jesse Bering

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: The Generous Marriage

Τhe latest work by the artist Martin Klimas begins with splatters of paint in fuchsia, teal and lime green, positioned on a scrim over the diaphragm of a speaker.

Then the volume is turned up. For each image, Klimas selects music — typically something dynamic and percussive, like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis or Kraftwerk — and the vibration of the speaker sends the paint aloft in patterns that reveal themselves through the lens of his Hasselblad. Klimas rose to prominence in the art world four years ago for a series of photos that captured porcelain figurines just as they shattered. For this series, Klimas spent six months and about 1,000 shots to produce the final images from his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. In addition to the obvious debt owed to abstract expressionism, Klimas says his major influence was Hans Jenny, the father of cymatics, the study of wave phenomena. The resulting images are Klimas’s attempt to answer the question “What does music look like?”

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: Drops of water

by AntiWorldNews  

Philosophy was the origin of most scientific disciplines.   Aristotle was in some sense an astronomer, a physicist, a biologist, a psychologist and a political scientist. 

As various philosophical subdiscplines found ways of treating their topics with full empirical rigor, they gradually separated themselves from philosophy, which increasingly became a purely armchair enterprise, working not from controlled experiments but from common-sense experiences and conceptual analysis.

In recent years, however, the sciences — in particular, psychology and the social sciences — have begun to return to their origin, combining data and hypotheses with conceptual and normative considerations that are essentially philosophical.  An excellent example of this return is the new psychological science of happiness, represented, for example, by the fundamental work of Edward Diener.

The empirical basis of this discipline is a vast amount of data suggesting correlations (or lack thereof) between happiness and various genetic, social, economic, and personal factors.  Some of the results are old news: wealth, beauty, and pleasure, for example, have little effect on happiness.  But there are some surprises: serious illness typically does not make us much less happy, marriage in the long run is not a major source of either happiness or unhappiness.

The new research has both raised hopes and provoked skepticism.  Psychologists such as Sonja Lyubomirsky have developed a new genre of self-help books, purporting to replace the intuitions and anecdotes of traditional advisors with scientific programs for making people happy.  At the same time, there are serious methodological challenges, questioning, for example, the use of individuals’ self-reports of how happy they are and the effort to objectify and even quantify so subjective and elusive a quality as happiness.

But the most powerful challenge concerns the meaning and value of happiness.  Researchers emphasize that when we ask people if they are happy the answers tell us nothing if we don’t know what our respondents mean by “happy.”  One person might mean, “I’m not currently feeling any serious pain”; another, “My life is pretty horrible but I’m reconciled to it”; another, “I’m feeling a lot better than I did yesterday.”  Happiness research requires a clear understanding of the possible meanings of the term.   For example, most researchers distinguish between happiness as a psychological state (for example, feeling overall more pleasure than pain) and happiness as a positive evaluation of your life, even if it has involved more pain than pleasure.  Above all, there is the fundamental question: In which sense, if any, is happiness a proper goal of a human life?

These issues inevitably lead to philosophical reflection. Empirical surveys can give us a list of the different ideas people have of happiness.  But research has shown that when people achieve their ideas of happiness (marriage, children, wealth, fame), they often are still not happy.  There’s no reason to think that the ideas of happiness we discover by empirical surveys are sufficiently well thought out to lead us to genuine happiness.  For richer and more sensitive conceptions of happiness, we need to turn to philosophers, who, from Plato and Aristotle, through Hume and Mill, to Hegel and Nietzsche, have provided some of the deepest insight into the possible meanings of happiness.

Even if empirical investigation could discover the full range of possible conceptions of happiness, there would still remain the question of which conception we ought to try to achieve.  Here we have a question of values that empirical inquiry alone is unable to decide without appeal to philosophical thinking.

This is not to say that, as Plato thought, we can simply appeal to expert philosophical opinion to tells us how we ought to live. We all need to answer this question for ourselves.  But if philosophy does not have the answers, it does provide tools we need to arrive at answers. If, for example, we are inclined to think that pleasure is the key to happiness, John Stuart Mill shows us how to distinguish between the more sensory and the more intellectual pleasures. Robert Nozick asks us to consider whether we would choose to attach ourselves to a device that would produce a constant state of intense pleasure, even if we never achieved anything in our lives other than experiencing this pleasure.

On another level, Immanuel Kant asks whether happiness should even be a goal of a good human life, which, he suggests, is rather directed toward choosing to do the right thing even if it destroys our happiness.  Nietzsche and Sartre help us consider whether even morality itself is a worthy goal of human existence. These essential questions are not empirical.

Still, psychologists understandably want to address such questions, and their scientific data can make an important contribution to the discussion.  But to the extent that psychology takes on questions about basic human values, it is taking on a humanistic dimension that needs to engage with philosophy and the other disciplines — history, art, literature, even theology — that are essential for grappling with the question of happiness. (For a good discussion of philosophical views of happiness and their connection to psychological work, see Dan Haybron’s Stanford Encyclopedia article.)  Psychologists should recognize this and give up the pretension that empirical investigations alone can answer the big questions about happiness.  Philosophers and other humanists, in turn, should be happy to welcome psychologists into their world.

Gary Gutting,  professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dam

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: 12 Happiness Habits for Busy People

India is on the way to becoming the world’s fastest growing country by 2014.

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In the next three years, up to 25% of the world’s new workers will be Indian

Source: Hindu

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42% of the world’s poor live in India.That’s over 450 million people living below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day, according to the World Bank.

Source: World Bank

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India’s GDP per capita will quadruple from 2007 to 2020, according to Goldman Sachs.

Source: Goldman Sachs

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Property prices in Mumbai and Delhi have more than doubled in the past 18 month.

Source: Reuters

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India’s tech capital, Bangalore, has increased its office supply by six times since 2006, and now has more Grade-A offices than Singapore.

Source: Business Standard

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Half the world’s outsourced IT services come from India, amounting to a $47 billion dollar industry.

Source: Sourcing Line

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India is the world’s second largest importer of arms and has spent $50 billion on defense purchases in the last decade.

Source: India Defence Online

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India’s Cherrapnuji is the wettest places on earth, receiving 425 inches of rain every year.

Source: BBC

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A bigger movie market than America and Canada combined, India sold 3.2 billion tickets last year.

Source: Bloomberg

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The average Indian is nearly 20 years younger than the average Japanese (26 vs 45).Indians are also around ten years younger than rival China, which was limited in growth by its one-child policy.

Source: Bloomberg

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In recent decades, 500,000 female births have gone missing each year due to (illegal) sex selection and abortion.

Source: Boston Globe

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India has 568 million more registered voters than the US — and a better turnout rate too.

Source: The International

India used to account for 33% of the world’s GDP; then fell to 3%; now may rise to 25%.

India led the world in GDP before the industrial revolution, when population meant productivity, and India had the largest population. Following the industrial revolution, India entered a long period of economic stagnation.

The future outlook comes from Goldman Sachs, which sees India passing the U.S. economy in 2050, trailing only China.

Source: Goldman Sachs

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: Impressive Facts About China

Germany should look to its past and ensure that Greece does not face a humiliating exit from the eurozone.

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Many in Europe – particularly in Germany – wonder why they should continue providing financial support to a country that has failed to honour its commitments to its partners; a state which is an international laggard in all major indicators, including competitiveness, innovation and transparency. Such objections are understandable but mistaken. Europe stands to lose as much as Greece itself from an exit of the latter from the eurozone.

It is not just the spreading of the virus of uncertainty to the other countries of Europe’s southern periphery, the repercussions on the northern European economies and the impact on the process of European integration that began from the ruins of the second world war. If Greece falls, Cyprus will, too, due to its exposure to the Greek economy, and Europe will lose two outposts in the eastern Mediterranean, which have lost none of their significance on the international power chessboard.

 Greece is also Europe’s first barrier to the tidal waves of illegal immigration originating in Asia. It has lifted the burden for everyone, with very little assistance. If the EU thinks that we are not really doing a great job guarding its frontiers, wait and see the chaos that will ensue when Greece is out of the way.

 A third good reason to bail out Greece is to prevent its Balkanisation, which would result from the extreme poverty and the inability to import medicines, fuel, and food after a disorderly default. Unlike Argentina, Greece does not have its own currency to devalue. We will have to introduce a new currency from scratch, with no exchange value whatsoever, and no means to support it, since Greece is not a net exporter of raw or manufactured goods. The political system will collapse and even democracy will be in danger. The EU and Nato would derive no benefit from a new source of tension in the Balkans, which they have fought to stabilise in recent decades. It would be a grave mistake.

Moreover, our European partners should not forget that certain syndicated interests that may have succeeded in preserving their privileges and tax evasion may still be rife in Greece, but the majority of the Greek people have made huge sacrifices, in order to shoulder the harshest fiscal consolidation programme ever implemented in a developed country. A Greek exit from the EU would be tantamount to betrayal of all those who have foregone so much.

The same goes for a large part of the political system. Greek politicians may have proved incompetent but no one can accuse them of ulterior motives. The two-thirds majority of MPs who voted for the new economic memorandum knew they were signing the end of their political careers. Papandreou and Samaras, the leaders of the two major parties, have risked their dissolution by backing the country’s stay in the eurozone, against populist voices promising that everything will be solved if Greece starts printing valueless drachmas. All opinion polls show that Greeks, despite their sacrifices, vow to remain in the eurozone. The images of riots and violence relayed to the end of the world by the media are the work of a small minority and police incompetence. When the world sees 100,000 rallying in Athens, what they don’t see is the 4 million other Athenians who are not rallying, or burning, or rioting; just trying to survive and make ends meet, in a country where nothing really works anymore.

Europe can bypass the proven incompetence of Greek politicians with safety valves, such as the broadening of the powers of its Task Force for Greece, the provision of technical aid or the tying of the disbursement of bailout instalments to tangible progress in reforms. From a purely realist point of view, this is a much better choice than letting the country go down.

But there is also an ethical argument: modern Europe exists thanks to ancient Greece and modern Greece exists thanks to the European powers that guaranteed its independence in the early 19th century. Since then, Greeks have more than repaid their debt. They fought to defend western ideals and interests in every corner of the world – from the trenches of Europe, to the hills of Korea and the deserts of the Gulf. When Germans fell into the darkness of Nazism, when the empires of old (Belgium, Netherlands, France) surrendered within days, only Greeks and Brits were left standing. Ask those who were cowering from the pounding of Luftwaffe in the tube stations of London, during the long winter of 1940, and they will tell you that the only pieces of good news they were getting for months, were coming from the Greek mountains.

 Germany knows full well that national humiliation can backfire and ought to remember that when it found itself in need, its own debt underwent a haircut and its mistakes were forgiven. The Germans are not known for their diplomatic and political foresight and have paid for this dearly in the past. Let them not drive all Greeks, conservatives and liberals, supporters and opponents of austerity, innocent and culprits, to unite against them.

Nikos Chrysoloras 

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: Aerial viewing of Greece

Luc Bergeron creates a masterpiece from some of the best time-lapse videos online. 179 time-lapse videos are compiled into one 4 minute compilation called ‘Welcome to Earth’ featuring First Aid Kit’s ‘Wolf’.

The song 

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: Human Planet

Science can be glorious; it can bring clarity to a chaotic world. But big scientific discoveries are by nature counterintuitive and sometimes shocking. Here are ten of the biggest threats to our peace of mind.

1. The Earth is not the center of the universe.

We’ve had more than 400 years to get used to the idea, but it’s still a little unsettling. Anyone can plainly see that the Sun and stars rise in the east, sweep across the sky and set in the west; the Earth feels stable and stationary. When Copernicus proposed that the Earth and other planets instead orbit the Sun,

… his contemporaries found his massive logical leap “patently absurd,” says Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It would take several generations to sink in. Very few scholars saw it as a real description of the universe.”

Galileo got more grief for the idea than Copernicus did. He used a telescope to provide evidence for the heliocentric theory, and some of his contemporaries were so disturbed by what the new invention revealed—craters on a supposedly perfectly spherical moon, other moons circling Jupiter—that they refused to look through the device. More dangerous than defying common sense, though, was Galileo’s defiance of the Catholic Church. Scripture said that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and the Holy Office of the Inquisition found Galileo guilty of heresy for saying otherwise.

2. The microbes are gaining on us.

Antibiotics and vaccines have saved millions of lives; without these wonders of modern medicine, many of us would have died in childhood of polio, mumps or smallpox. But some microbes are evolving faster than we can find ways to fight them.

The influenza virus mutates so quickly that last year’s vaccination is usually ineffective against this year’s bug. Hospitals are infested with antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus bacteria that can turn a small cut into a limb- or life-threatening infection. And new diseases keep jumping from animals to humans—ebola from apes, SARS from masked palm civets, hantavirus from rodents, bird flu from birds, swine flu from swine. Even tuberculosis, the disease that killed Frederic Chopin and Henry David Thoreau, is making a comeback, in part because some strains of the bacterium have developed multi-drug resistance. Even in the 21st century, it’s quite possible to die of consumption.

3. There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we’re probably in one now.

Paleontologists have identified five points in Earth’s history when, for whatever reason (asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions and atmospheric changes are the main suspects), mass extinctions eliminated many or most species.

The concept of extinction took a while to sink in. Thomas Jefferson saw mastodon bones from Kentucky, for example, and concluded that the giant animals must still be living somewhere in the interior of the continent. He asked Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for them.

Today, according to many biologists, we’re in the midst of a sixth great extinction. Mastodons may have been some of the earliest victims. As humans moved from continent to continent, large animals that had thrived for millions of years began to disappear—mastodons in North America, giant kangaroos in Australia, dwarf elephants in Europe. Whatever the cause of this early wave of extinctions, humans are driving modern extinctions by hunting, destroying habitat, introducing invasive species and inadvertently spreading diseases.

4. Things that taste good are bad for you.

In 1948, the Framingham Heart Study enrolled more than 5,000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, to participate in a long-term study of risk factors for heart disease. (Very long term—the study is now enrolling the grandchildren of the original volunteers.) It and subsequent ambitious and painstaking epidemiological studies have shown that one’s risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, certain kinds of cancer and other health problems increases in a dose-dependent manner upon exposure to delicious food. Steak, salty French fries, eggs Benedict, triple-fudge brownies with whipped cream—turns out they’re killers. Sure, some tasty things are healthy—blueberries, snow peas, nuts and maybe even (oh, please) red wine. But on balance, human taste preferences evolved during times of scarcity, when it made sense for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to gorge on as much salt and fat and sugar as possible. In the age of Hostess pies and sedentary lifestyles, those cravings aren’t so adaptive.

5. E=mc²

Einstein’s famous equation is certainly one of the most brilliant and beautiful scientific discoveries—but it’s also one of the most disturbing. The power explained by the equation really rests in the c², or the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) times itself, which equals 34,700,983,524. When that’s your multiplier, you don’t need much mass—a smidgen of plutonium is plenty—to create enough energy to destroy a city.

6. Your mind is not your own.

Freud might have been wrong in the details, but one of his main ideas—that a lot of our behaviors and beliefs and emotions are driven by factors we are unaware of—turns out to be correct. If you’re in a happy, optimistic, ambitious mood, check the weather. Sunny days make people happier and more helpful. In a taste test, you’re likely to have a strong preference for the first sample you taste—even if all of the samples are identical. The more often you see a person or an object, the more you’ll like it. Mating decisions are based partly on smell. Our cognitive failings are legion: we take a few anecdotes and make incorrect generalizations, we misinterpret information to support our preconceptions, and we’re easily distracted or swayed by irrelevant details. And what we think of as memories are merely stories we tell ourselves anew each time we recall an event. That’s true even for flashbulb memories, the ones that feel as though they’ve been burned into the brain:

Like millions of people, [neuroscientist Karim] Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections… As clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.

7. We’re all apes.

It’s kind of deflating, isn’t it? Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection can be inspiring: perhaps you’re awed by the vastness of geologic time or marvel at the variety of Earth’s creatures. The ability to appreciate and understand nature is just the sort of thing that is supposed to make us special, but instead it allowed us to realize that we’re merely a recent variation on the primate body plan. We may have a greater capacity for abstract thought than chimps do, but we’re weaker than gorillas, less agile in the treetops than orangutans and more ill-tempered than bonobos.

Charles Darwin started life as a creationist and only gradually came to realize the significance of the variation he observed in his travels aboard the Beagle. For the past 151 years, since On the Origin of Species was published, people have been arguing over evolution. Our ape ancestry conflicts with every culture’s creation myth and isn’t particularly intuitive, buteverything we’ve learned since then—in biology, geology, genetics, paleontology, even chemistry and physics—supports his great insight.

8. Cultures throughout history and around the world have engaged in ritual human sacrifice.

Say you’re about to die and are packing some supplies for the afterlife. What to take? A couple of coins for the ferryman? Some flowers, maybe, or mementos of your loved ones? If you were an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, you’d have your servants slaughtered and buried adjacent to your tomb. Concubines were sacrificed in China to be eternal companions; certain Indian sects required human sacrifices. The Aztecs slaughtered tens of thousands of people to inaugurate the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan; after sacred Mayan ballgames, the losing team was sometimes sacrificed.

It’s hard to tell fact from fiction when it comes to this particularly gruesome custom. Ritual sacrifice is described in the Bible, Greek mythology and the Norse sagas, and the Romans accused many of the people they conquered of engaging in ritual sacrifice, but the evidence was thin. A recent accumulation of archaeological findings from around the world shows that it was surprisingly common for people to ritually kill—and sometimes eat—other people.

9. We’ve already changed the climate for the rest of this century.

The mechanics of climate change aren’t that complex: we burn fossil fuels; a byproduct of that burning is carbon dioxide; it enters the atmosphere and traps heat, warming the surface of the planet. The consequences are already apparent: glaciers are melting faster than ever, flowers are blooming earlier (just ask Henry David Thoreau), and plants and animals are moving to more extreme latitudes and altitudes to keep cool.

Even more disturbing is the fact that carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. We have just begun to see the effects of human-induced climate change, and the predictions for what’s to come range from dire to catastrophic.

10. The universe is made of stuff we can barely begin to imagine.

Everything you probably think of when you think of the universe—planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, dust—makes up just 4 percent of whatever is out there. The rest comes in two flavors of “dark,” or unknown stuff: dark matter, at 23 percent of the universe, and dark energy, at a whopping 73 percent:

Scientists have some ideas about what dark matter might be—exotic and still hypothetical particles—but they have hardly a clue about dark energy. … University of Chicago cosmologist Michael S. Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”

The effort to solve it has mobilized a generation of astronomers in a rethinking of physics and cosmology to rival and perhaps surpass the revolution Galileo inaugurated on an autumn evening in Padua. … [Dark energy] has inspired us to ask, as if for the first time: What is this cosmos we call home?

But astronomers do know that, thanks to these dark parts, the universe is expanding. And not only expanding, but expanding faster and faster. Ultimately, everything in the universe will drift farther and farther apart until the universe is uniformly cold and desolate. The world will end in a whimper.

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”  Nothing could be closer to the truth.  But before you can begin this process of transformation you have to stop doing the things that have been holding you back.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Stop spending time with the wrong people. – Life is too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness out of you. If someone wants you in their life, they’ll make room for you. You shouldn’t have to fight for a spot. Never, ever insist yourself to someone who continuously overlooks your worth. And remember, it’s not the people that stand by your side when you’re at your best, but the ones who stand beside you when you’re at your worst that are your true friends.

Stop running from your problems. – Face them head on. No, it won’t be easy. There is no person in the world capable of flawlessly handling every punch thrown at them. We aren’t supposed to be able to instantly solve problems. That’s not how we’re made. In fact, we’re made to get upset, sad, hurt, stumble and fall. Because that’s the whole purpose of living – to face problems, learn, adapt, and solve them over the course of time. This is what ultimately molds us into the person we become.

Stop lying to yourself. – You can lie to anyone else in the world, but you can’t lie to yourself. Our lives improve only when we take chances, and the first and most difficult chance we can take is to be honest with ourselves. Read The Road Less Traveled.

Stop putting your own needs on the back burner. – The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too. Yes, help others; but help yourself too. If there was ever a moment to follow your passion and do something that matters to you, that moment is now.

Stop trying to be someone you’re not. – One of the greatest challenges in life is being yourself in a world that’s trying to make you likeeveryone else. Someone will always be prettier, someone will always be smarter, someone will always be younger, but they will never be you. Don’t change so people will like you. Be yourself and the right people will love the real you.

Stop trying to hold onto the past. – You can’t start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading your last one.
Stop being scared to make a mistake. – Doing something and getting it wrong is at least ten times more productive than doing nothing. Every success has a trail of failures behind it, and every failure is leading towards success. You end up regretting the things you did NOT do far more than the things you did.

Stop berating yourself for old mistakes. – We may love the wrong person and cry about the wrong things, but no matter how things go wrong, one thing is for sure, mistakes help us find the person and things that are right for us. We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future. Every single thing that has ever happened in your life is preparing you for a moment that is yet to come.

Stop trying to buy happiness. – Many of the things we desire are expensive. But the truth is, the things that really satisfy us are totally free – love, laughter and working on our passions.

Stop exclusively looking to others for happiness. – If you’re not happy with who you are on the inside, you won’t be happy in a long-term relationship with anyone else either. You have to create stability in your own life first before you can share it with someone else. Read Stumbling on Happiness.

Stop being idle. – Don’t think too much or you’ll create a problem that wasn’t even there in the first place. Evaluate situations and take decisive action. You cannot change what you refuse to confront. Making progress involves risk. Period! You can’t make it to second base with your foot on first.

Stop thinking you’re not ready. – Nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means we won’t feel totally comfortable at first.
Stop getting involved in relationships for the wrong reasons. – Relationships must be chosen wisely. It’s better to be alone than to be in bad company. There’s no need to rush. If something is meant to be, it will happen – in the right time, with the right person, and for the best reason. Fall in love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely.

Stop rejecting new relationships just because old ones didn’t work. – In life you’ll realize that there is a purpose for everyone you meet. Some will test you, some will use you and some will teach you. But most importantly, some will bring out the best in you.

Stop trying to compete against everyone else. – Don’t worry about what others are doing better than you. Concentrate on beating your own records every day. Success is a battle between YOU and YOURSELF only.

Stop being jealous of others. – Jealousy is the art of counting someone else’s blessings instead of your own. Ask yourself this: “What’s something I have that everyone wants?”

Stop complaining and feeling sorry for yourself. – Life’s curveballs are thrown for a reason – to shift your path in a direction that is meant for you. You may not see or understand everything the moment it happens, and it may be tough. But reflect back on those negative curveballs thrown at you in the past. You’ll often see that eventually they led you to a better place, person, state of mind, or situation. So smile! Let everyone know that today you are a lot stronger than you were yesterday, and you will be.

Stop holding grudges. – Don’t live your life with hate in your heart. You will end up hurting yourself more than the people you hate. Forgiveness is not saying, “What you did to me is okay.” It is saying, “I’m not going to let what you did to me ruin my happiness forever.” Forgiveness is the answer… let go, find peace, liberate yourself! And remember, forgiveness is not just for other people, it’s for you too. If you must, forgive yourself, move on and try to do better next time.

Stop letting others bring you down to their level. – Refuse to lower your standards to accommodate those who refuse to raise theirs.

Stop wasting time explaining yourself to others. – Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe it anyway. Just do what you know in your heart is right.

Stop doing the same things over and over without taking a break. – The time to take a deep breath is when you don’t have time for it. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. Sometimes you need to distance yourself to see things clearly.

Stop overlooking the beauty of small moments. – Enjoy the little things, because one day you may look back and discover they were the big things. The best portion of your life will be the small, nameless moments you spend smiling with someone who matters to you.

Stop trying to make things perfect. – The real world doesn’t reward perfectionists, it rewards people who get things done. Read Getting Things Done.

Stop following the path of least resistance. – Life is not easy, especially when you plan on achieving something worthwhile. Don’t take the easy way out. Do something extraordinary.

Stop acting like everything is fine if it isn’t. – It’s okay to fall apart for a little while. You don’t always have to pretend to be strong, and there is no need to constantly prove that everything is going well. You shouldn’t be concerned with what other people are thinking either – cry if you need to – it’s healthy to shed your tears. The sooner you do, the sooner you will be able to smile again.

Stop blaming others for your troubles. – The extent to which you can achieve your dreams depends on the extent to which you take responsibility for your life. When you blame others for what you’re going through, you deny responsibility – you give others power over that part of your life.

Stop trying to be everything to everyone. – Doing so is impossible, and trying will only burn you out. But making one person smile CAN change the world. Maybe not the whole world, but their world. So narrow your focus.

Stop worrying so much. – Worry will not strip tomorrow of its burdens, it will strip today of its joy. One way to check if something is worth mulling over is to ask yourself this question: “Will this matter in one year’s time? Three years? Five years?” If not, then it’s not worth worrying about.

Stop focusing on what you don’t want to happen. – Focus on what you do want to happen. Positive thinking is at the forefront of every great success story. If you awake every morning with the thought that something wonderful will happen in your life today, and you pay close attention, you’ll often find that you’re right.

Stop being ungrateful. – No matter how good or bad you have it, wake up each day thankful for your life. Someone somewhere else is desperately fighting for theirs. Instead of thinking about what you’re missing, try thinking about what you have that everyone else is missing.

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: 

Top five regrets of the dying

12 Happiness Habits for Busy People

Timing is everything, particularly in the case of amazing photography.

Some 850 million people go to bed hungry. If the right decisions are made now, we can feed the world and address inequality.

Save the Children is to be applauded for reminding us all of one of the most extraordinary and humiliating aspects of living in the modern world: child hunger. Drawing a parallel with the fight to abolish slavery, the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah recently asked what future generations will condemn us for. One sure candidate is the needless human carnage wrought by hunger. Some 850 million people (one in eight of the world’s population) go to bed hungry every night. Many of them are children, for whom early hunger leaves a lifelong legacy of cognitive and physical impairment. The human and economic waste is horrifying.

Such hunger is not due to a shortage of food – globally there is enough to go round and if (a big if) we make the right decisions now, we can continue to feed the world despite population growth and climate change. By some estimates, stopping the waste of food after harvest due to poor storage or transport infrastructure, and then in our own kitchens, could free up half of all food grown. The number of overweight and obese people in the world, suffering their own health problems, including a sharp rise in heart disease and diabetes, is roughly equal to the number of hungry people. That highlights one of the underlying causes of hunger – extreme levels of inequality, both within and between countries.

Ending hunger is entirely feasible (indeed, once achieved, the only question will be why it took us so long). It requires action at several different levels. At a national level, progressive governments in Brazil and Ghana have shown how to cut hunger sharply, through cash transfers to poor people, raising the minimum wage and investing in smallholder farmers (especially women), who both produce food, and are some of the poorest and hungriest people in the Alice in Wonderland world of a brutally unfair farming system.

That focus on national decisions and national politics highlights how fast the world is changing. In many cases, aid is no longer the main story – countries like India, growing at 8% a year and with a mushrooming middle class, need to take responsibility for their hungry masses, introducing proper taxation and effective social services to end hunger and malnutrition. Oxfam is working with people’s organisations within the country to bring that about. Elsewhere, though, international food aid remains essential, but should be improved, for example by ending the waste and delay of transporting food thousands of miles from donor countries and giving cash instead.

Beyond supporting aid for food and agricultural investment, what else can we in the well-fed countries do? Start by putting our own house in order. The rich countries are part of both the solution and the problem. Europe and America’s push to reduce their dependence on imported oil and gas has led them to introduce targets and subsidies for biofuels, but these compete directly with food production, forcing up prices for poor people. Rich country greenhouse gas emissions are driving climate change at a pace that outstrips even the most pessimistic projections of the climate modellers, and there are few signs of governments agreeing (still less achieving) the kinds of reductions needed to avoid catastrophic temperature rises that will particularly harm tropical agriculture. We urgently need an international effort to find a way to feed the planet’s growing population without destroying its ecosystems, yet current investments are feeble.

Hunger is both a cause and a symptom of poverty. Damaged bodies and brains are a moral scandal and a tragic waste of economic potential. That hunger exists at all shows the urgency of redistributing income and assets to achieve a fairer world. Providing the additional calories needed by the 13% of the world’s population facing hunger would require just 1% of the current global food supply. That that redistribution has not already taken place is truly something to be ashamed of.

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Duncan Green is the author of From Poverty to Power and has been Oxfam GB’s head of research since November 2004

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: Child Labor Is increasing Around The World

According to Google, one hour of web video is uploaded to YouTube each second. This short animation straight from the horse’s mouth does the rest of the math, complete with cute visualizations to help viewers wrap their heads around the crazy data.

• 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

• Every day, more than 3 billion videos are viewed.

• More video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the three major U.S. networks created in 60 years.

• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the U.S.

• YouTube is localized in 25 countries across 43 languages.

For an interactive experience, check out http://www.onehourpersecond.com/.

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: The Rise and Fall of Megaupload

Adam Lashinsky of Fortune has written the book, “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired — And Secretive — Company Really Works.“. Some important notes from this book.

Concentrate your best people on your most important project

Keep everything secret

At Apple, secrecy isn’t simply about not telling the media when you’re working on something. It’s about not telling your fellow coworkers what you’re working on.

 Secrecy has a few benefits: It prevents the newest product in the pipeline from stealing the thunder of what’s currently on the market. It also helps employees to stay head-down and focused on their own work instead of worrying about what other people are doing.

Obsess over the details

Lashinsky reports that Apple has a room dedicated to working on designing and building new boxes for Apple’s products. It wants people to be thrilled with an iPhone from the minute it’s in a consumer’s hands. It’s this attention to detail that separates Apple from its rivals. All startups should get the small things right.

Screw focus groups, make what you want

Apple built the first Apple computer because, “we we really wanted one,” said Steve Jobs in early 80s. The same was true of the iPhone and the iPad in the early 2000s. Apple execs hated using crappy smartphones and wanted to do better. Apple makes products it wants to use that it thinks it can do better than the rest.

Stay focused!

In response that last point, just because you think you can do something better, doesn’t always mean you should do it. Think about Google. It thinks it can do everything better than everyone else. It ends up doing some things very well, but most things are done in a so-so way.

One of Apple’s great strengths is that you can basically lay out everything it does on one table. It’s a table that’s getting bigger and bigger, but it’s still just one table.

Don’t do focus groups, but do pay attention to your users

Another key point from Lashinsky: Apple might not do focus groups, but it does pay very close attention to what you’re doing with your gadgets. From there, Apple makes decisions about what to pursue next. For instance, yesterday Tim Cook said the people that use Apple TV really love it, and he added that Apple was trying to figure out how to make it go “main market,” because people like using it.

Only a few people should worry about the profit and loss statement

Apple’s CFO is the only person that “owns” the P&L, and that’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer, says Lashinsky. The other person who kept an eye on P&L was Steve Jobs. Presumably, it’s Tim Cook now.

In a normal company, controlling the P&L of your division is a big deal. You’re king of your own domain if you do that. At Apple, Jobs stripped it away from other managers and VPs so they could just focus on doing what they do best: build great products. They don’t worry about expenses.

Hold individuals accountable

D.R.I. — Directly Responsible Individual, is a key phrase at Apple. What it means is that for every product, or feature, there is someone that can be held responsible for its success or failure. Apple doesn’t have committees, and in the book Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, “At Apple you can find out exactly who is responsible.” There is no room for excuses. If you’re leading a team, you better do your job.

Hire the best people you can

Former Apple employee Mike Janes, quotes Steve Jobs: “A players hire A players, and B players hire C players. We want only A players here.

Limit your executives’ extra-curriculars

Apple doesn’t let its employees stray from Apple. Tim Cook was the only executive who sat on the board of another company. (Nike.) When Andy Miller, who used to run the iAds group asked Jobs if he could be on the board of another company, Jobs said, ” What? You’re barely cutting it here and you want to go spend your time helping someone else’s company? I don’t even let Forstall out of the office.” (He’s talking about Scott Forstall, the guy in charge of iOS software.
Keeping people in-house, keeps them focused. It can also lead to “insularity” says Lashinsky. So, it’s a delicate balance.

Keep teams small

Apple tries to keep the teams working on big products under 100. Since the creation of the Mac, Steve Jobs has always preferred teams to be around that size. It’s a way to keep a team focused and organized. It’s also a way to replicate a startup within a bigger company.

Don’t promote people just for the sake of promoting them

At most companies, employees who do well in their job are looking for promotions, title bumps, and increased responsibilities. According to Lashinsky, Apple will give people raises, but it tries to keep people in jobs where they excel.

For instance, if you’re a great designer, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a great manager of designers. In a normal company, though, you’d have to be promoted to manager to move up in the company’s hierarchy. At Apple you can be paid more to do the same job. The idea is to get people in the perfect job, and keep them there.

Lashinsky says Jobs, “Let people’s talent their jobs, not the jobs define the people.”

Control your message

Apple’s PR control is notorious. It rarely answers the press. It rarely makes its executives available for comment. Its number one vehicle for getting its message out is big staged events. In those events it uses the same phrases over and over to drive home its point. And those phrases are always simple and clear for the press and consumers to understand.

Start with design, and let it lead the way for the rest of the product

Most companies come up with product ideas, marketing plans, and all of that before talking to the designer of the product. At Apple it’s flipped. The designers hold all the cards. They determine what’s going into the product. From there, Apple figures out the rest.

Above all else, focus on the customer

This is the most important thing at Apple. Create products and experiences that users will love. If you do that well, then the rest will fall into place.

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: 

11 Unusual Ways Steve Jobs Made Apple The World’s Most Admired Tech Company

Idolize Bill Gates, Not Steve Jobs

Laughter is the most obvious outward sign of happiness. But is it better for our health than we ever imagined?

Tell a Pygmy a good joke and the probability is that he or she will drop to the floor and roll on the ground in side-slapping, uproarious laughter. The Dobuans of New Guinea, on the other hand, revile laughter and enjoy misery. Feuding Greenland Inuits resolve disputes by publicly humiliating themselves to see who gets laughed at the most and lower-caste Tamil men giggle when addressing someone from the upper caste to express humility.

by AntiWorldNews 

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Happiness is a journey

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