Archive for March 31st, 2017
From “Royal Altess” by Thomas Mann
“You think? Your are wrong. I’am not an aristocrat, I’m all the opposite, by reason and by taste.
“Proof is for mathematical theorems and alcoholic beverages. It’s not for science.”
You’ll agree with me that if I decline the vivas of the people, it’s not out of pride: I have the taste of humanity and kindness.
The greatness of mankind is a miserable thing and often, it seems to me that men should know it , and conduct themselves humanly and with kindness and not to seek to be humiliated or to cow tow to one another.
Littérature et Poésie‘s photo.
“Proof is for mathematical theorems and alcoholic beverages. It’s not for science.”
Michael Mann goes on to explain that science is all about “credible theories” and “best explanations” and his critics are not offering up any of those.
Mann’s attempt to separate proof from science stems from increasing public awareness that the warming predicted by the high-sensitivity models that Mann and others have championed just have not occurred over the last 15 years.
Public invasion of private female space: In women’s literature
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 31, 2017
War in white sheets: The public invasion of the private female space in women’s literature
Abstract
The dichotomy between the “angel in the house’ and the “devil in the flesh” used to symbolize the restrictions facing women in 19th century literature.
With the advance of the different stages of feminism, this (dichotomy) began to slowly dissipate as more female heroines began to be depicted as a major part of both the private and public spheres.
Does a more prolific female presence eliminate this opposition?
This research paper will focus on whether such a distinction continues to preside over the works of female novelists, and the works under study are Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Story of Zahra and Women of Sand and Myrrh in addition to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.
Full Text:
References
ACCAD, EVELYNE, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East, New York: New York UP, 1990.
AL-SHAYKH, HANAN, The Story of Zahra: A Novel, 1986, Trans. Peter Ford, New York: Anchor Books, 1995.
Women of Sand and Myrrh, 1989, trans. Catherine Cobham, London: Quartet Books, 1993.
COOKE, MIRIAM, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
DARRAJ, SUSAN, “We All Want the Same Things Basically’: Feminism in Arab Women’s Literature”, Women and Language 26.1, (Spring 2003), pp. 79 – 82.
GELBLUM, AMIRA, “Ideological Crossroads: Feminism, Pacifism, and Socialism”, Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace 1870 – 1930, Ed. Billie Melman, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 307 – 327.
GRIFFITHS, MORWENNA, Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity, London: Routledge, 1995.
LESSING, DORIS, The Golden Notebook, 2nd ed. London: Flamingo, 1972.
MOKHTAR, KHAOULA, “Becoming Liberated in Beirut”, Women of the Mediterranean, ed. Monique Gadant, trans. A. M. Berret, New Jersey: Zed Books, 1986, pp 5 – 11.
SALIBA, THERESE, “Arab Feminism at the Millennium”, Signs, Vol. 25, No. 4, Feminisms at a Millennium, (Summer, 2000), pp. 1087-1092.
SEGAL, LYNNE, Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism, London: Virago, 1987
“Two or three things that I know about…” Part two
Sabine de Bustros and Loris Moutran had a bunch of questions.
For two years, they interviewed 28 French personalities whom they never met before, and gathered their responses. This part include samples of answers.
1 If the night could say a word?
2 What is eternity?
3 If you were an echo?
4 If you were a gesture?
5 What cannot be communicated?
6 What is fear?
7 What do you watch alone?
8 What you could never forget?
9 How do you negotiate with the unknown?
10 You are a tear drop: Where do you stop?
11 You are a caress: Where do you land?
12 What is sadness?
13 What is smile?
14 What is an emotion?
15 What silence holds?
16 What cannot be grabbed?
17 What is the impossible?
18 What is not logical?
19 Any use for the redundant?
20 What is beauty?
21 What is decency?
22 What is leaving?
23 What is your noise?
24 What give eternity to emotions?
25 What gesture for sadness?
26 If pain was a location: Where would it be?
27 If soul could give a kiss: Where would it be given?
28 If tears could form a sentence?
29 What is the Hour of the moon?
30 What is the gift of autumn?
31 What is a terrible love?
32 What is the sound of solitude?
33 If you were an error, a mistake?
34 What season describes best?
35 What mark would you leave?
36 Ask a single question to God
37 What book you like to be?
38 What fictitious love affair you like to have?
39 Where is your ideal stopover?
40 What is an instant?
41 What’s the origin of solitude?
42 What is your preferred dance?
43 Your preferred water?
44 Preferred light?
45 Preferred rhythm?
46 preferred work of art?
47 Preferred Word?
48 Space you would hate to fill?
49 If you were a lie?
50 Is fire a beginning or an end?
51 If you were a form?
52 A question most revealing about you?
53 In what shape should God appear?
54 A single reason to selling your soul?
55 What would you suppress or delete if you were immortal?
56 What is induced sadness?
57 The single fear you would like to confront?
58 What in life is never anticipated?
59 What justify the truth of a word?
60 What word is as powerful as a storm?
61 The music of your life?
62 How to be reincarnated?
63 The difference between destiny and fatality
64 Name your prime emotion
65 What God should know?
66 A compliment that destabilizes you?
67 Time is a wheel or a stage?
68 Is life a question or an answer?
69 Would you build in space or in time?
70 What would you introduce as a preamble?
71 What is your own question?
Transhuman species: It is there. Won’t make a dent on mankind species…
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 31, 2017
Can a Robot emulate human emotions? That should not be the question…
A robot programmed with an artificial intelligence that can learn how to love and express emotions is feasible, and highly welcomed.
A child robot David can acquire and follow the various stages of kids emotional development, all the way to adulthood.
The question is why scientists should invest time and energy creating robot that would exacerbate the current calamities experienced and witnessed of human emotions and love consequences and trials?
Have we not gotten enough of negative jealousy that generates serious pains, frustrations, beating, castration, killing…?
It is getting evident that parents will no longer enjoy the adequate quality time and opportunities to caring full-time for nurturing the kids.
A kid nurturing robot at home will be the best invention for the stability and healthy emotional development of isolated kids in the future…
If robots have to convey emotions and feeling, they had better extend proper nurturing examples that kids at home may emulate…
Robots must learn to listen to the kids, ask questions, circumvent human shortcomings in failure to communicate, overcome the tendency of kids in building negative fictitious myths and role played empathy projected in relationship…
The movie “AI” of Steven Spielberg investigated the limits of man and machines confronted at the ineluctable problems:
1. The child separation from family members, particularly the mother early emotional attachment…The moment we discover that our mother is Not perfect and our father is a coward…
2. The moment it dawn on the child that we are Not unique, perfect, really loved…as we wished it should be…
2. The moment we realize that we are no longer the center of the universe and that community is too busy to care for our future…
4. The moment we accept that we are “All alone” and we have to fend for our health, safety, mental sanity…
5. The moment we feel that we were left bare and unprepared to face the desolate world around us…
Should the kid robot replace the myth of the “Blue Fairy?” This fairy supposed to:
1. Heal the torn parts in the separation with family members…
2. Render possible what we came to learn as irreversible, irreparable, and almost unfeasible…?
3. Convince us that there is always a person out there who will love us, be a true friend for life…
4. Bring our way this person who suffered and felt wounded as we are…
5. Keep at bay those cannibals, ever ready to sacrifice man and animal under the pretense of “celebrating life“
A child robot with unconditional devotion, soft-spoken, cultured, patient, and willing to listen to our lucubrations…
The happy ending that teaches us to grasp and grab on the fleeting moments of rich happiness, to taste the powerful instants of tenderness…
Freed at last from illusion, myths and these comfortable peaceful world views we thought we had acquired in childhood…
We do live on the assumption of recovering what we had lost, learning that what we lost “Never existed” in the first place…
At least, a compassionate kid robot would extend, now and then, at critical difficult moments, a glimpse of our childhood innocent belief system, of a world of goodness, sensibility, and wonder…
Little robot David should learn how and when to inject a healthy dose of emotional adrenaline to keep us sane, and ready to face the real world with more courage, more determination to disseminate what is good in us, the compassion needed to sustain and maintain our hope in a better future…
Note: This post was inspired from an article in the monthly Lebanese magazine Sante/Beaute #21. The article was not signed, but the source maybewww.shaomi blog.net
Adonis Diaries 