13 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
History of the Weekdays
By the third century the seven-day week had become common in private
life throughout the Roman Empire. Each day was dedicated to one of the
seven planets. Those seven, according to the current astronomy, included
the sun and the moon, but not the earth. The order in which planets
governed the days of the week was: sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter,
Venus, and Saturn. This order was not that of their then supposed distance
from the earth, which was the "normal" order in which Dante, for exampl... 1 
notes
notesFrom astronomy and astrology to religion, complete with superstitions.
19 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
America is Naturally Anti-Science
In the end, politics is about story. Robert McKee, Hollywood's master of storytelling, views the world from the top of America's other great cultural export—its movies.
"1 think that the American ethos is not science-friendly and never has been," he says. "The American model is Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Guys who never went to college and who were geniuses and invented things, and people like them. The inventor versus the scientist. Somebody who can go west, discover gold mines, and cr...
1 Science is hard work, America is about the dream of Hollywood. We are living on the benefits of science, but will those innovations become cultural rituals if we won't do what we need to do to promote science and education?
18 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Chinese Cultural Innovations Turned to Ritual
When Europeans first arrived in China, three hundred years a^ago, they found that almost all the arts had reached a certain degree of perfection there, and they were surprised that a people which had attained this point should not have gone beyond it. At a later period they discovered traces of some higher branches of science that h had been lost. The nation was absorbed in productive industry; the greater part of its scientific processes had been preserved, but science itself no longer exist...
1 An account of the amazing art and inventions found in China, but how these had turned into unquestioned rituals--performed exactly over and over again through the ages without alteration or innovation. The culture had stagnated.
