05 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Alien Plot to Invade the Earth: First Undermine Faith in ...
“Given a time gap of forty thousand hours, the strategic value of any traditional tactics of war or terror is insignificant, and they can recover from them. To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.”
The science consul said, “The plan focuses on emphasizing the negative environmental effects of scientific development and showing signs of supernatural power to the population of Earth. In ... 1 
notes
notes12 OCT 2014 by ideonexus
The Absurd Visions from a Post-Hypnotic Suggestion
I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they'd implanted it, but that didn't make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists' vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn't st... 1 notes
notesA character debunks all the crazy things running through his head with rationality.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Cost of Irrational Fears
Imagine the typical emotional reaction to seeing a spider: fear, ranging from minor trepidation to terror. But what is the likelihood of dying from a spider bite? Fewer than four people a year (on average) die from spider bites, establishing the expected risk of death by spider at lower than 1 in 100 million. This risk is so minuscule that it is actually counterproductive to worry about it: Millions of people die each year from stress-related illnesses. The startling implication is that the r...
1 Garrett Lisi explains how the stress caused by many of our fears of statistically-unlikely events is more likely to kill us.
25 AUG 2012 by ideonexus
Prayer is Silent Observation
Learning to pray, then as I understand it, is learning to listen with the mind and the heart – making oneself attentive to each exquisite detail of the world. It is a fearsome exhilarating task, best suited to solitude and silence. Such prayers are answered not with miracles tagged with our names, or those of our loved ones, but with beauty and terror. For the prayerful listener, the world becomes the sublime scripture, full of stories of structure and chaos, law and chance, complexificatio...Folksonomies: observation prayer
Folksonomies: observation prayer
1 notes
notesSimply looking at the world for what it is and what it has to tell us.
05 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Sad Evolutionary History of Humans
I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not led him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toi...Folksonomies: evolution big history
Folksonomies: evolution big history
1 notes
notesCome out of the wilderness as a brute, filled with terrors, and constantly subject to a cruel world.
01 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Differences Between Humans and Apes
It is well-known that both rude and civilized peoples are capable of showing unspeakable, and as it is erroneously termed, inhuman cruelty towards each other. These acts of cruelty, murder and rapine are often the result of the inexorable logic of national characteristics, and are unhappily truly human, since nothing like them can be traced in the animal world. It would, for instance, be a grave mistake to compare a tiger with the bloodthirsty exectioner of the Reign of Terror, since the form... 1 notes
notesIt's not possible to compare the violence in the general animal world to that of humans.
31 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
An Early Incorrect Assumption About Plate Tectonics
Though the theories of plate tectonics now provide us with a modus operandi, they still seem to me to be a periodic phenomenon. Nothing is world-wide, but everything is episodic. In other words, the history of anyone part of the earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror. That they occur dramatically and infrequently; as opposed to our modern understanding of them being gradual and perpetual.
08 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
We are as Children in the Dark
[A]s children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror . . .Folksonomies: philosophy naturalism
Folksonomies: philosophy naturalism
1 notes
notesA quote from Lucretius.
