Many perfumes and fragrances are unsustainably extracted from plants and animals or made from synthetic chemicals. I wanted to find another way.

“The Tale of Genji,” often called Japan’s first novel, was written 1,000 years ago. Yet it still occupies a powerful place in the Japanese imagination. A popular TV drama, “Dear Radiance” – “Hikaru kimi e” – is based on the life of its author, Murasaki Shikibu: the lady-in-waiting whose experiences at court inspired the refined world of “Genji.”

Romantic relationships, poetry and political intrigue provide most of the novel’s action. Yet illness plays an important role in several crucial moments, most famously when one of the main character’s lovers, Yūgao, falls ill and passes away, killed by what appears to be a powerful spirit – as later happens to his wife, Aoi, as well.

Someone reading “The Tale of Genji” at the time it was written would have found this realistic – as would some people in different cultures around the world today. Records from early medieval Japan document numerous descriptions of spirit possession, usually blamed on spirits of the dead. As has been true in many times and places, physical and spiritual health were seen as intertwined.

Archive: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/XuAaf | Excerpts:

According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, 'consonance'—a pleasant-sounding combination of notes—is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these 'integer ratios' are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music 'dissonant,' unpleasant sounding.

But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong.

First: "We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us."

Second:

"Western research has focused so much on familiar orchestral instruments, but other musical cultures use instruments that, because of their shape and physics, are what we would call 'inharmonic.'"

"Our findings suggest that if you use different instruments, you can unlock a whole new harmonic language that people intuitively appreciate, they don't need to study it to appreciate it. A lot of experimental music in the last 100 years of Western classical music has been quite hard for listeners because it involves highly abstract structures that are hard to enjoy. In contrast, psychological findings like ours can help stimulate new music that listeners intuitively enjoy."

One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology. Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others?

The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-thirties are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one.

In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.

Original link

awhile back i did a brief post on native names for major cities for the website Cohost. anyways, i've spent approximately the past week assembling place names for a much more comprehensive map--as of writing, more than 1,000 individual points from approximately 60 different sources are listed--and you can find that at the submission link here.

this is what i'm calling v. 0.1 of this project and pretty much the moment this post goes up i'll be back to adding new names. because this is such a large project i've only gotten around to a handful of states in great detail—but rest assured, a lot more is coming. the next big part of the map in progress is the Ojibwe sphere of influence which should knock out most of the Great Lakes area.

any errors or corrections you happen to notice are appreciated

5 years ago I founded /r/AskBibleScholars and I've been wanting to bring this knowledge off-Reddit and into the wider Internet. Thankfully, @Penguincoder@beehaw.org has been instrumental in getting this set up for us.

I have a handful of scholars that have agreed to run through some beta testing and they have their accounts set up.

Right now, we could use any of you to make accounts there and ask some questions. This will give us all the opportunity to test out the software and generate feedback.

If you would be so kind, then please head over to AskBibleScholars.com, create an account and ask some questions.

Thank you.

[...] So often online, we interact in ways that are intimate enough to feel significant, but so disconnected they’re essentially mysterious. Sometimes on Napster, you’d begin downloading a file only to see its owner sever the connection. For rarer files, I remember this being every bit as devastating as it must have been for Sam Anderson, watching these shades flit onto his screen and then, without a word, click away.

I really like this blog post.

They leave the industry so it remains overwhelmingly male—perpetuating the hostile environment.

Recent strikes targeting the southern Ukrainian city, including its orthodox cathedral, have left residents questioning its historical links to Russia.

What books/podcasts/videos do you recommend on philosophy?

Can be of any style (introductory or more comprehensive), just would be good to build up a repository on here and see who else is interested in philosophy more generally.

I find The Prince by Machiavelli fascinating, can definitely see how some leaders take his ideas to heart.

Social researchers claim there is a fairly large group of Russians who simultaneously support further offensive actions in the war and peace negotiations. At a recent conference hosted in Moscow by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) on the topic of how Russians are adapting to the “geopolitical changes”, even the sociologists who are loyal to the regime painted a picture of the average Russian as apathetic and above all seeking to maintain a sense of “normality,” which had to be discouraging for the Kremlin.