Category: Opinion
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A Japanese Soda Company's Ad on the Moon
Well, it’s finally happening. Forty-five years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed at the Sea of Tranquility, the Moon is about to become an ad space. The Japanese drink company Otsuka is planning to send a 2.2-pound titanium can filled with “powdered sports drink and children’s dreams” to the Moon, where it will sit…
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5 Worst Referee Mistakes in History of Football
Football is the most popular sport to play and watch only because it is unpredictable. Every player, coach and fan knows that their team will get a free bees from referee’s mistake sooner or later. Football is round too. Be a good loser… Here are 5 worst referee mistakes in history of football:
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Portrait of My Creature "Theo"
Theo Jansen is part-artist, part-mad scientist. From PVC piping, he builds fantastical creatures that feed only on the wind: propelled by the movement of the air around them, his many-legged Strandbeest are free to roam the countryside and beaches around his house in the Netherlands. From a distance, they look like enormous grazing sheep, but…
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Rich Kids of Instagram
The main drive that got our ancestors got out of the cave and brought us into the instagram era is the drive to excess. United nations claims that the year 2010 had the biggest social mobility that our planet has experienced so far. The middle class of Asia, Africa and Latin American is the biggest…
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Men spend a year staring at women
The average man will spend almost 43 minutes a day staring at 10 different women. That adds up to 259 hours – almost 11 days – each year, making a total 11 months and 11 days between the ages of 18 and 50. But researchers found that the males of the species are not the…
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Riccardo’s latest Book "Reflections of Persia"
Reflections of Persia celebrates the journey of a scholar, photographer, literary translator, and above all, an Iranologist, who has gone above and beyond the political borders of Iran. Riccardo began his academic career in 1978, and at present, chairs the Department of Eurasian Studies at the University of Venice, where he teaches Persian literature…
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FUTEBOL FUTEBOL FUTEBOL
Dualtagh Herr: ” FUTEBOL FUTEBOL FUTEBOL is a series of photographs of football pitches in Brazil located from Google satellite view. The images were made by scanning the terrain of the towns and cities of Brazil using Google’s vast collection of satellite imagery in search of the football pitches that are a prominent feature in…
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Amsterdam Pays with Beer to Clean Streets
Amsterdam’s head of the Rainbow Foundation project Gerrie Holterman said: “This group of chronic alcoholics was causing a nuisance in Amsterdam’s Oosterpark: fights, noise, disagreeable comments to women,”. Therefore they came up with the idea of paying those people with beer and warm meal to help keep the streets tidy. Apparently the success story might…
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Does Jellyfish Really Live Forever?
While it is often joked that cats have nine lives, a certain species of jellyfish has been deemed “immortal” by scientists who have observed its ability to, when in crisis, revert its cells to their earliest form and grow anew. That means that these tiny creatures, 4 mm to 5 mm long, potentially have infinite…
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Endless Love
Romantic ideology still has its allure, but the idea that passion can last a lifetime has lost credence in modern times. One argument against enduring intensity comes from thinking rooted in the work of the great 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza: emotions occur when we perceive a significant change in our situation. Change cannot last…
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Iran Among World’s 20 Drunkest Countries
In one account, Belarus, Moldova and Russia are the biggest drinkers in the world but those figures only tell part of the story. Not everyone drinks and if you exclude non drinkers, the ranking will change. By this measure, France drinks a lot, but because it has one of the lowest rate of abstainers at…
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Live Video Stream of Earth From Sky
One of the latest missions from the ISS is kind of amazing. The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment consists of four cameras that have been attached outside of the ISS. Though temperature is controlled, the cameras are exposed to the radiation from the sun, which will allow astronauts to understand how radiation affects the…
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the Art of Sleeping Alone
Sophie Fontanel is the best selling French author of L’envie, (desire), a book on her account of more than ten years of celibacy, that just came out in the US under the title: “the Art of Sleeping Alone”. Sophie tells the provocative story of her decision to stop having sex at the age of twenty…
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More Obese in the World Than Suffering From Hunger
The new book published by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations explained the fact that there are more obese in the world than suffering from hunger. based on the research presented in the book, Barbara Burlingame one of the agency’s principle officer said that for 925 million critically hungry people, there are…
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Modern Logic and Buddhist philosophy
Western philosophers have not, on the whole, regarded Buddhist thought with much enthusiasm. As a colleague once said to me: ‘It’s all just mysticism.’ This attitude is due, in part, to ignorance. But it is also due to incomprehension. When Western philosophers look East, they find things they do not understand – not least the…
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Bizzare Vintage Advertisment
Nowadays we can’t even pace the changes that happen in the values and manners on daily bases therefore these ads are defiantly bizarre. Ad that shows newborn drinking 7up or ad that tries to sell cigaret by making fun of women.
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Mysterious Auction
Medical student under the pseudonym Elizabeth Raine who put her virginity on auction since spring of the last year closed her Bidding auction on May 7. Highest Bid for Elizabeth Raine’s Virginity Is $801,000. Instead of all the hype she decided not to have sex for now and instead focus on her medical studies.…
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The 10 Strang Facts About Men's Private Part
Men sexual organ not only helps to creates life but also is one of the biggest cause of war and the same time art and culture. The drive to repeat our characteristics and identity indeed is a form of immortality that nature allowed us to practice. Nature also went through million years of trial and…
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If You Live Near A Park, You're More Likely To Be Happy
If you want to be happy, living near a park could be a good idea. More and more research shows a relationship between green space and higher levels of mental health. The latest comes from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Researchers looked at 2009 survey data that asked 2,500 residents about depression, anxiety, and stress. They…
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Portrait of a Girl – 0 to 14 years in 4 min
Days, weeks, months and years are flying by. We use to observe and even contemplate on that fact once in a blue moon but thanks to accessible technology and social networks, we can remind our self that how short and fast life goes by.
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Is Capitalism Failed the World
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century is a balanced approach to the major theme of the global economical inequality. He believes that not only does capitalist growth not reduce inequality; it increases it. Here are some of the outline summery of Jeff Faux’s critical review in The Nation magazine: Thomas Piketty just tossed an…
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Charlie Chaplin, monster
By 1915, says Ackroyd, Chaplin was ‘the most famous man in the world’. Lenin said that ‘Chaplin is the only man in the world I want to meet.’ He stayed with Churchill at Chartwell. At Nancy Astor’s house he met Shaw and Keynes. Barrie and H.G. Wells were fans. Debussy told him, ‘You are instinctively…
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The Conflict Between Competition and Leisure
In 1930 the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that increases in productivity due to technological progress would lead within a century to most people enjoying much more leisure. He believed that by 2030 the average working week would be around fifteen hours. Eighty-four years later, it doesn’t look like this prediction will come true. Most…
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َAlpha and Beta Men
Arnold Schwarzenegger used to hold the record for having arms that measured the exact same size, and from an athlete to an actor. Arnold’s body has been the subject of envy among many men. Is it his muscles those envious eyes are looking at, or simply the sex appeal his body had among women, that…
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History of Drinking Wine in Iran
From archaeological excavations that suggest northwest Iran was one of the earliest places where wine was produced — more than 6,000 years ago — to the tale of medieval French knights bringing grapes from the city of Shiraz, where the great Persian poet Hafez lived and wrote about his love of drink, there are…
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Why We Find Some Languages More Beautiful Than Others.
Don’t judgments about a language’s beauty or ugliness generally depend on our personal experiences with people who speak it, and the associations it evokes? Brazilian Portuguese is considered especially soft and melodic – and it inspires thoughts of the bossa nova and Copacabana. Spanish calls up visions of flamenco, bullfights, and – maybe – especially…
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Why Are Va… Important To You
Here’s a video from the kids at Connecticut College who asked 100 of the men at their college to explain why they think that vaginas are important as a part of a campaign for V Day. The results are hilarious and heartwarming, with answers ranging from “vaginas are beautiful” to “I spent some time in…
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The love of stuff
We’ve got used to the transitory nature of our possessions, the way things are routinely swept aside and replaced – whether it’s last season’s cut of jeans or computers that mysteriously slow down as if clogged by quick-drying cement. It’s one of the challenges facing the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, whose chief…
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Do the Dead Live On In Facebook?
Think of how rich and deeply personal your online persona has become. Now think of what will happen to it when you die. Until very recently, this question used to feel unusual or irrelevant for all but a tiny, ultrawired slice of the population. In a New York Times Magazine feature about online death last…
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Disease are Culture Makers
The threat of disease is not uniform around the world. In general, higher, colder, and drier regions have fewer infectious diseases than warmer, wetter climates. To survive, people in this latter sort of terrain must withstand a higher degree of “pathogen stress.” Thornhill and his colleagues theorize that, over time, the pathogen stress endemic…
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Endless fun
In the late 1700s, machinists started making music boxes: intricate little mechanisms that could play harmonies and melodies by themselves. Some incorporated bells, drums, organs, even violins, all coordinated by a rotating cylinder. The more ambitious examples were Lilliputian orchestras, such as the Panharmonicon, invented in Vienna in 1805, or the mass-produced Orchestrion that came…
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The Rise of the Single Dad
Caroline Kitchener in The Atlantic Today, more men than ever are making the same choice. A Pew Research study published this statistic this summer: 8 percent of households with minor children are now headed by a single father, up from just one percent in 1960. This represents a nine-fold increase, from fewer than 300,000 households…
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Writers Into Saints
Tim Parks in The New York review of the Books Over the last ten years or so I have read literary biographies of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Hardy, Leopardi, Verga, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Moravia, Morante, Malaparte, Pavese, Borges, Beckett, Bernhard, Christina Stead, Henry Green, and probably others too. With only the rarest of exceptions,…
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Poet of the Caribbean- Derek Walcott
Teju Cole in Sunday Book Review, The new York Times “Writing poetry is an unnatural act,” Elizabeth Bishop once wrote. “It takes skill to make it seem natural.” The thought is kin to the one John Keats expressed in an 1818 letter to his friend John Taylor: “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the…
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Why is Academic Writing so Academic
Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm…
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A Day in the Life of the Ku Klux Klan
“Bringing a Message of Hope and Deliverance to White Christian America! A Message of Love NOT Hate!” These words are the first, one sees after going on the Ku Klux Klan’s, website. But the Klan’s name has always been synonymous with hatred and white supremacy sentiments, antisemitism, racism and hatred against blacks. Anthony Karene, a…
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The Master and Margarita
Naturally, much of Bulgakov’s frustration with the socio-political systems of his day bleeds through the story, an exploration of human nature in a sometimes highly surreal and seemingly random setting. Bulgakov’s imagination takes playful leaps, embroidering recurring symbols throughout. I also feel how we interpret these fanciful routines and playful satire within the stories is…
