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Northern kings generally entrusted their sons’ upbringing to a stranger, for they thought that so they would be treated with less indulgence than at home. Accordingly Helgi was fostered by Hagal, and under his care the young prince became so fearless that at the age of fifteen he ventured alone into the hall of Hunding, with whose race his family was at feud.  Norse Myths  Página 173 Jake Jackson  2014 dC  Editora: Flame Tree Publishing

Last year, I spearheaded a survey and interview research project on the experiences of scientists at field sites. Over sixty percent of the respondents had been sexually harassed, and twenty percent had been sexually assaulted. Sexual predation was only the beginning of what I and my colleagues uncovered: study respondents reported psychological and physical abuses, like being forced to work late into the day without being told when they could head back to camp, not being allowed to urinate, verbal threats and bullying, and being denied food. The majority of perpetrators are fellow scientists senior to the target of abuse, the target themselves usually a female graduate student. Since we started analyzing these data, I haven’t been able to read a single empirical science paper without wondering on whose backs, via whose exploitation, that research was conducted. When the payoff is millions of dollars of research money, New York Times coverage, Nobel Prizes or even just tenure, we ofte...

A case in point: the popular Facebook page “I f*cking love science” posts quick-take variations on the “science of x” theme, mostly images and short descriptions of unfamiliar creatures like the pink fairy armadillo, or illustrated birthday wishes to famous scientists like Stephen Hawking. But as the science fiction writer John Skylar rightly insisted in a fiery takedown of the practice last year, most people don’t f*cking love science, they f*cking love photography—pretty images of fairy armadillos and renowned physicists. The pleasure derived from these pictures obviates the public’s need to understand how science actually gets done—slowly and methodically, with little acknowledgement and modest pay in unseen laboratories and research facilities.  The rhetoric of science has consequences. Things that have no particular relation to scientific practice must increasingly frame their work in scientific terms to earn any attention or support. The sociology of Internet use suddenly tr...

There are many strange coincidences in our world. The mass of the electron is 2000 times smaller than the mass of the proton. Why? The only known reason is that if it would change few times, life as we know it would be impossible. The masses of the proton and neutron almost coincide. Why? If one of their masses would change just a little, life as we know it would be impossible. The energy of empty space in our part of the universe is not zero, but a tiny number, more than a hundred orders of magnitude below the naive theoretical expectations. Why? The only known explanation is that we would be unable to live in the world with a much larger energy of vacuum. The relation between our properties and the properties of the world is called the anthropic principle. But if the universe were given to us in one copy, this relation would not help. We would need to speculate about the divine cause making the universe custom built for humans. Meanwhile, in the multiverse consisting of many differe...

Na verdade, o conceito de comércio televisivo que triunfa na Casa dos Segredos não tem nenhuma ideia "escandalosa" - o "es-cândalo" é tão-só um gadget de marketing, vazio e instrumental. O sistema narrativo imposto aos olhares dos espectadores consiste em criar momentos "exóticos", desligados de qualquer elaboração de um qualquer ponto de vista, multiplicando a vulgaridade do pitoresco (há dias, as câmaras fixavam-se longamente nos gestos de um homem que massajava os pés de uma mulher...). O objetivo, brutal e inane, é apenas um: gerar um olhar de pura indiferença. O verdadeiro escândalo (escândalo de poder, entenda-se) é esse: a injeção quotidiana, em todo o tecido social, de avalanchas de indiferença, de tal modo que a contemplação das imagens produza um bocejo de pueril gratificação. Fenómenos como a Casa dos Segredos massacram, dia após dia, qualquer entendimento minimamente inteligente do trabalho com as imagens. Mais do que isso: escamoteiam o...

What scientific idea is ready for retirement? ESSENTIALISM (...) Moral controversies such as those over abortion and euthanasia are riddled with the same infection. At what point is a brain-dead accident-victim defined as "dead"? At what moment during development does an embryo become a "person"? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such questions. An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there's no one instant when "personhood" should be deemed to have arrived. The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail: "But there has to be some moment when the foetus becomes human." No, there really doesn't, any more than there has to be a day when a middle-aged person becomes old. It would be better – though still not ideal – to say the embryo goes through stages of being a quarter human, half human, three quarters human… The essentialist mind will recoil from such language...