24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus

 Our Relationship to Our Thinking

I invite you to pay attention to anything—the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair—for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought. It sounds simple enough: Just pay attention. The truth, however, is that you will find the task impossible. If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything—even the feeling of a knife at your throat—for more than a few seconds, before you...
  1  notes

Sam Harris on mindfulness in the many religious traditions.

03 MAR 2011 by ideonexus

 The Flow of Semen Every Sixty Seconds

Humanity pumps 53.4 billion liters of bloodper minute, but that red river is not surprising; it must flow to sustain life.  At the same time, humanity's male organs eject forty-three tons of semen, and the point is that though each ejaculation is also an ordinary physiological act, for the individual it is irregular, intimate, not overly frequent, and not even necessary. Besides, there are millions of old people, children, voluntary and involuntary celibates, sick people, and so forth. And y...
Folksonomies: science humanity statistics
Folksonomies: science humanity statistics
  1  notes

While this statistic is fictional, it is plausible and thought-provoking considering how Stanislaw Lem philosophizes on it.