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Showing posts from July, 2018

Astrophysics - Neil deGrasse Tyson

I have always loved astronomy from the days of Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox and most recently Neil deGrasse Tyson. I followed the Moon landings and the space probes, Pioneer, Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo, etc and the Viking Lander on Mars. Those pictures and data they brought back were fantastic. It seems my love of space seems to be infectious as all my children read religiously all my books on space, the planets, stars, and explorations with a lot of pictures of the landscape of the Moon - the Apollo programs, Venus, Mars, and more recently the dwarf planet Pluto by New Horizons. Recently, when on YouTube I came across a whole range of celebrities and icons, who still believe that the earth is flat. I thought that this issue was settled by the ancient Greeks, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Aristotle, etc and Aristarchus and Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth and knew it's placed in our solar system. If these great thinkers could deduce this with none of the a

The Lucifer Effect - The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE)

A book by  Philip Zimbardo  titled " The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil" came out in the 2008 paperback. Its psychological undertones were displayed in the 2010 film "The Experiment", Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment - 1992 ( a documentary) and in the 2015 film ' The Stanford Experiment '.  The book's basis is that "good" people can turn "evil" when exposed to the right circumstances. When studied, the Professor explained the dark periods of our history, the  most terrible atrocities f rom the Holocaust, the atrocities in Rwanda, Sudan, Bosnia, Burundi, Kosovo, Albania, Rape of Nanking, My Lai,  Jonestown in Guyana , etc. The perpetrators could be described as every day, normal people. They would be called monsters by their victims. All of the stories are gruesome, and it shows the depravity that the human soul can descend when exposed to the appropriate stimuli. This book's reading points to the uncomfortabl