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Non-monogamie: le tableau pratique
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vruz:
To: You
Hey Jammers and Creatives,
We are all living through the digital revolution, an amazing, exciting time where knowledge is free and the world is at our fingertips. But there is a dark side to our digital emancipation. Jumping brain syndrome, decreased creativity, isolation and depression all stem from an overload of instantly accessible media.
Next week during Digital Detox Week we urge you to take some time to pull back from the wired world and assess the damage. Rethink your love affair with technology, stop obsessing over your virtual life, get outside and reignite your relationships with each other. You don’t have to go cold turkey on the screens in your life – we won’t. Simply take a few small steps away from them every day.
To help prepare you for this challenge here are links to some of the most inspiring mental environmental stories we’ve run recently:The End of Childhood
Children who spend more time inside than in the wilderness experience poorer health in adulthood. We must let them roam free.Virtual Morality
As videogames create better, more immersive models of reality, are we free to do anything we want in a virtual world, or are some things still inherently wrong?Quit Facebook
The decision to destroy my carefully built-up virtual image came as a result of wanting to enhance my profile.The Era of Simulation
Consequences of a digital revolution.Happy Detoxing,
The Adbusters TeamWhen you cut off the arterial blood to an organ, the organ dies. When you cut the flow of nature into people’s lives their spirit dies. It’s as simple as that … Check out Adbusters “Ecopsychology” issue on newsstands this week.
Although we may recognize the importance of hard work, the glamour of success tends to trump it in our admirations. The graft and grind of real effort is put into shadow by those whose achievements appear effortless. The office star promoted ahead of us has the frustrating knack of making the job look easy and their abilities look instinctive and natural in comparison to our clumsy efforts. The mystique of a Hollywood legend like Clint Eastwood is reinforced by the feeling he doesn’t have to try, unlike the hardworking character actors who bill below him. The toiling midfielder may impress the pundits, but the terraces cheer loudest for the graceful striker who effortlessly scores every week.
The ability of effortlessness to raise one person’s achievements above another is not unique to our age. In 1528 Italian noble Baldassare Castiglione wrote a small manual of advice about desirable conduct in the Renaissance court, an arena every bit as conscious of success as any in the modern day. The Book of The Courtier urges the importance of the value of what Castiglione calls sprezzatura. His advice is “to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”
However, we shouldn’t just note that Castiglione’s sprezzatura is about the importance of being effortless, but that it emphasises appearing to be effortless, and concealing the effort that goes into what we do. For how ever beguiling the spell of sprezzatura it has a paradox at its heart – it’s a lot of hard work.
The overhead kick that seals the cup tie may look effortless, but it takes hours of practice on the training field. Sinking into the piano stool to spontaneously delight an assembled crowd with a collection of popular favourites disguises hours practicing scales. The perfect take in an Oscar performance is built on the hundreds on the cutting room floor and the rehearsals that went before.
Indeed, the psychologist Anders Ericsson’s work on the development of expertise has yielded the so-called “10,000 hour rule” - developing any skill to an expert level takes 10,000 hours of practice. Perhaps, then, when we reflect on the apparently limited rewards our own hard work has bought we should remember Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn’s reported witticism, “Give me a couple of years and I’ll make that actress an overnight success.”
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Modern cosmology theory holds that our universe may be just one in a vast collection of universes known as the multiverse. MIT physicist Alan Guth has suggested that new universes (known as “pocket universes”) are constantly being created, but they cannot be seen from our universe.
In this view, “nature gets a lot of tries — the universe is an experiment that’s repeated over and over again, each time with slightly different physical laws, or even vastly different physical laws,” says Jaffe.
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