Genius and villainy.

31 10 2007

Genius and villainy are two things incompatible, aren’t they? If that popular expressions is veracious then what about “evil genius”? Or may be a genius is such conception which could not be seen in proper from an ordinary person‘s point of view? But as said T. S. Eliot, evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table. And so far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist. So the list of 100 living geniuses shows us people that really made something and it does not mention what exactly the did and some of them are continuing to do.

Among 100 names, called by The Telegraph we can find out such odious figure as Osama Bin Laden. First two position of the Top List were given to chemist from Swiss Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD and to Tim Berners-Lee who invented internet, also in the list we can see such really eminent contemporaries as Philip Glass, Grigory Perelman, Daniel Barenboim, The Dalai Lama, Philip Roth, Henry Kissinger, Meryl Streep, Paul McCartney and others.
Funny Halloween!


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Categories : Great quotes, History, News

Are you ready for your closeup?

28 10 2007

“Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.” —Cardinal Richelieu

“We don’t know enough about you.” —Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Google controls your e-mail, your videos, your calendar, your searches… What if it controlled your life?
By Cory Doctorow

This new fiction story “SCROOGLED” BY Cory Doctorow that was published in “RADAR FICTION “ is not such fantastic as it could be imagined at first sight. Anyway one has to read it. Here is a short fragment of this story, more of the text you can find in my library.


CLEAN HANDS? Google knows your dirtiest little secrets

“She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. “Top of the light pole there; don’t look,” she said. “That’s one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk.”

“In the grand scheme of things, it hadn’t cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. Greg hadn’t paid much attention when the cameras on all those access points went public—there’d been a day’s worth of blogstorm while people played with the new all-seeing toy, zooming in on various prostitute cruising areas, but after a while the excitement blew over.
Feeling silly, Greg mumbled, “You’re joking.”
“Come with me,” she said, turning away from the pole.
The dogs weren’t happy about cutting their walk short, and expressed their displeasure in the kitchen as Maya made coffee.
“We brokered a compromise with the DHS,” she said, reaching for the milk. “They agreed to stop fishing through our search records, and we agreed to let them see what ads got displayed for users.”
Greg felt sick. “Why? Don’t tell me Yahoo was doing it already…”
“No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn’t the reason Google went along. You know, Republicans hate Google. We’re overwhelmingly registered Democratic, so we’re doing what we can to make peace with them before they clobber us. This isn’t P.I.I.”—Personally Identifying Information, the toxic smog of the information age—”It’s just metadata. So it’s only slightly evil.”
(photo taken from radaronline.com)


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Categories : Books, Computers, Future, Library, Secrets, Technology

Vatican reveals the Knights Templar’s secrets.

13 10 2007

As BBC reports that the Vatican is to publish a book which is expected to shed light on the demise of the Knights Templar, a Christian military order from the Middle Ages. Generally the documentary patrimony of the Vatican Secret Archives always arouses great interest. Today we have got opportunity to find out to read a great number very interesting documents related to the history of the Christian civilization from the Middle Ages until nowadays on the Vatican’s site. both for those documents regarding in general the history of the Christian civilization from the Middle Ages until nowadays and for those concerning the history of single nations; moreover, for some countries, the Vatican documents are the oldest ones, which even mark the beginning of their own national history.

Now the Vatican has published secret archive documents about the trial of the Knights Templar, including a long-lost parchment that shows that Pope Clement V initially absolved the medieval Christian order from accusations of heresy, officials said Friday. The history, the doctrines and the secret rituals of the Templars have incited, vexed and bewildered humanity for about 1.000 years. Since 1119. It was the year when nine knights from the South of France, who had already passed through the purgatory of the First Crusade, decided to found a new Order, with both military and sacerdotal valences: the Order of the Templar Knights. Or, by its official name: the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.The 300-page volume recently came out in a limited edition — 799 copies — each priced at $8,377, said Scrinium publishing house, which prints documents from the Vatican’s secret archives.


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Categories : Books, History, News, Religions, Secrets

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.

7 10 2007

There was fantastically curious article titlled “Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch ” in August’s NY Times. The article about the omniscient, that omnipotent who is the creator of the heavens and earth. So, why the omniscient could not be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims? Such a funny idea isn’t it? But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Unfortunately one has not any opportunity to choose principally another “station” but however one has to try, what if?
By the way the complete text of the article you can find in my library.


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Categories : Computers, Library, Mystery, Nature, Science, Secrets, Technology

Past and future Photo cameras.

4 10 2007

To those who spend a lot of time in photographing there is no need to prove the importance of using the different photography gadgets in a shooting process. A successful photograph is the result included a few hundred steps from equipment to framing and printing at the end.

By the way do you know that the first successful picture was produced in June/July 1827 by Niepce (pronounced Nee-ps), he used material that hardened on exposure to light and the picture required an exposure of eight hours. The author stayed known in history as first photograph. The earliest paper negative was produced in August 1835. No wonder that the negative was small (1″ square), and poor in quality. In 1851 a new era in photography was introduced by Scott Archer, who invented the collodion process. Actually you see that the history of photograph is long and fascinating story. In our age of cell phones, digital cameras and other high-tech gadgets there is nothing for us, but to choose needed camera and to take a photograph to everybody’s delight.


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Categories : History, Technology

African secrets.

2 10 2007

African religions is very interesting and particular part of the world history of religions, there are no sacred scriptures. Wellknown that religion in African societies (especially in tropical and south regions of Africa) is written not on paper but in people’s hearts, minds, oral history, rituals and religious personages like the priests, rainmakers, officiating elders and even kings. What about African formal rituals and ceremonies the theme is written a lot but the the question is not settled at all, there are many unexplored mysterious, enigmatic secrets there.

Traditional religions are not universal: they are tribal or national. Each religion is bound and limited to the people among whom it has evolved. One traditional religion cannot be propagated in another tribal group. This does not rule out the fact that religious ideas may spread from one people to another. But such ideas spread spontaneously, especially through migrations, intermarriage, conquest, or expert knowledge being sought by individuals of one tribal group from another. Traditional religions have no missionaries to propagate them; and one individual does not preach his religion to another.

Similarly, there is no conversion from one traditional religion to another. Each society has its own religious system, and the propagation of such a complete system would involve propagating the entire life of the people concerned. Therefore a person has to be born in a particular society in order to assimilate the religious system of the society to which he belongs. An outsider cannot enter or appreciate fully the religion of another society. Those few Europeans who claim to have been `converted’ to African religions - and I know some who make such fantastic claims ! - do not know what they are saying. To pour out libation or observe a few rituals like Africans, does not constitute conversion to traditional religions.

African religions have neither founders nor reformers. They may, however, incorporate national heroes, leaders, rulers and other famous men and women into their body of beliefs and mythology. Some of these figures are elevated to high national positions and may even be regarded as divinities responsible for natural objects or phenomena. These heroes and heroines form an integral part of the religious milieu of their society, whether or not they played a specifically religious role in their time.
The wonderfull world is full of secrets just we have to be more of inquisitive bent. But modern science has to work out a lot of another may be more necessity problems, global warming for example . African continent is part of our civilisation. International Carbon Markets experts will meet in Cape Town to address the challenges and opportunities of launching new carbon mitigation projects in Africa. Because Africa has the potential to play a key role to in mitigating climate change and reducing greenhouse gases. Africa will stimulate and bring new project developers and hosts to the forefront with the overall aim of increasing the size of the market.


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Categories : Religions, Secrets

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