How social media changes identity, personality, memory | Parker Posey

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink I wanted to find a place for myself to cast myself in a book and me starring on paper and play with the persona of the movie star, which I think people are interested in and find entertaining. I always did. And I come from—my family, they’re performative people. But I think every memoir is a self-mythologizing act, and in this digital time right now, the new screen time, the rise of this new screen—what are we losing? And what can we make to connect us even further to our own mythologies and our own stories and our own family? So when I was writing this I saw my trajectory and my family and my grandparents in these stories, so the act of writing was an interpretation and a period of catching this kind of energy in these stories. And it’s performative too, and that was also something that was coming through with the act of writing, was wanting to connect with people and maybe even travel with it, which I think could be really fun. A really casual karaoke party where people really “mean” the song and they’re not performing it, and they’re not imitating—and just play. You know, chill out, leave your cameras. There’s no one in the audience; we’re all going to be on stage now, isn’t that what this new screen is allowing us to make—even more fiction? It’s an interesting time. For me it’s like a separation and there’s a difference between a façade and a persona. A façade is evil but a persona is something that you play with. A façade is something you can’t really break through. But I think all these archetypes are all inside of us to work through, to really listen to, to be conscious of, to play with. And we should be playing with it. We should be acting out—in a safe space. Why is Halloween so popular? What is everyone getting out of dressing up for Halloween or Comic Con? There’s a real desire to break out of our skins and to be something bigger, something different.

The oil wars: How America's energy obsession wrecked the Middle East

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink --- So for a long time oil has played a special role in American foreign policy and military strategy. Oil is a uniquely important commodity in global affairs. It’s an input to everything in our modern way of life; it’s very important for protecting our prosperity; and at a certain level oil is essential for high-quality military power: to fight you need access to oil. And in the Cold War the United States was concerned that the Soviet Union could interrupt American access to Persian Gulf oil, which we needed in order to defend Europe, defend our own interests against the Soviet Union. And so we took it on as a military mission to protect key sources of oil supplies around the world, especially in the Persian Gulf, from outside interference (so from the Soviet Union being able to threaten them). Now, of course, for a long time the Soviet Union hasn’t existed. That particular scenario hasn’t posed a challenge for the United States, but the United States has feared oil has continued to play a role in American foreign and military policy because the United States has feared that political disruptions in Middle East—internal instability, the threat of extremist fundamentalist Muslim control in the Middle East, if that came about—could pose a threat to American oil supplies that especially would hurt our prosperity, that they could make us poor. And so we’ve used military force to try to reduce instability in parts of the world, especially the Persian Gulf, where we’re afraid that instability would threaten global oil markets. That policy has both been largely unnecessary and largely ineffective. So it has happened that there was a moment where it seemed to work very well when we sent troops in 1990 to defend Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein who had just concord Kuwait, and then we liberated Kuwait in the Gulf War but did not continue to attack Iraq. And the result of this was to maintain access to Persian Gulf oil, to maintain the independence of a number of Persian Gulf oil producers. And that made sense in a bunch of ways. But then since that time we’ve actually become a primary threat to stability in the Middle East rather than a primary guarantor of stability in the Middle East, in that when we invaded Iraq we set in motion a lot of events, created a much more salient internal stability challenge for many countries in the Persian Gulf by hardening and militarizing domestic conflicts in a lot of these countries—between Sunnis and Shiites, between different brands within Sunni Islam—we’ve created internal instability that we can’t address very well from outside. The United States lacks the detailed information to understand and manipulate the politics of these countries. Instead we get manipulated by local actors that, in a sense, makes the instability worse. So if you think of it this way, in the United States we spend a lot of time thinking about and studying American politics and elections, but we don’t understand American politics very well. Even with all of the background cultural knowledge we have an understanding of our own politics—nobody expected President Trump to rise as a phenomenon and become president—We don’t understand our own politics! How can we expect to understand and manipulate the politics of far away countries in the Persian Gulf where we don’t know the local percentages as well, we don’t know the situation on the ground, we don’t know what contributes to people’s political activism? Although we can actually be fairly sure of one thing that contributes, which is, they don’t like the feeling that they’re being pushed around by outside influences like the United States showing up and telling them what to do. And so we can create hostility to the United States by saying, “Oh we’re showing up to defend the stability of Middle East oil supplies,” but we can’t actually defend Middle East oil supplies from local instability in the Middle East very well, and so we’ve actually created a lot of the problems in the oil market. However, all of that said, the global oil market protects us so we don’t actually have to worry as much about that kind of instability in any particular oil supplier. So what happens in the oil market is when there’s a disruption in one country of the world that reduces their oil supplies, their ability to supply the global market, to supply consumers like us in the United States, when there’s that kind of a disruption other suppliers compensate. So suppliers that aren’t disrupted see an opportunity to make more money for themselves by increasing their oil output to compensate for the fact that one of their competitors has reduced their oil output.

Self-healing DNA may protect astronauts from killer radiation | Michelle Thaller

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Michelle Thaller: So Peter, you ask a really good question about radiation perhaps being a limiting factor in human exploration. And honestly this is something that people are working on very hard right now. It is indeed a challenge. The astronauts on the space station are actually fairly well-protected from radiation. The earth has a liquid metal core that generates a strong magnetic field around the earth, and amazingly the space station, which is about 200 miles above us, is still in that protective magnetic field. So when you’re just orbiting the earth on a space station the astronauts may get slightly higher doses of radiation, but they’re actually fairly well-protected. What happens if you go beyond the earth’s magnetic field though is that all of a sudden you’re vulnerable to the radiation of space. And specifically it’s our wonderful friend the sun—I mean none of us would be here without the energy and the light of the sun, but the sun actually outputs a lot of high-energy particles and these create high radiation levels anywhere where there isn’t a protected magnetic field. So for example, if you went to the moon, and in fact astronauts went to the moon in the 1960s and the 1970s, had there been a very powerful solar storm when the astronauts were there it may have made them very sick and might have even killed them. So in some sense it was good luck that when the astronauts were up on the moon not protected by the earth’s magnetic field the sun was relatively quiet. However, on a trip to Mars, which might take months (up to six months), you’re not going to be able to rely just on good luck. There will be solar activity. There will be bursts of high-energy particles from the sun. So how do you protect astronauts from that? And we’re working on technology—In some cases it’s a special kind of sleeping bag that you can get into and zip yourself up and have some protection, other ideas one of the best protectors against radiation is water. So if you have liquid water tanks on one side of your spacecraft you might be able to shelter from a solar storm by putting the water tanks between you and the sun. But if you’re actually going to be living and working in space for a long time, this really is a problem. If we were to send astronauts to Mars, for example, they wouldn’t be protected from the radiation unless they could dig under the ground and actually build their habitats—even just as much as ten feet down would be enough. But that’s hard. The Martian soil is very hard and rocky and not easy to dig through, and before you could go there you’d have to send construction equipment to actually build all of these habitats. So we understand that this is a problem. It’s one of the things that is limiting our exploration of the solar system. The robots that we build that go to Mars, like the Mars Rover or the spacecraft, there’s one orbiting Jupiter, they have to be extremely protected and shielded from the radiation of space. In fact our mission to Jupiter right now is called Juno and the instruments are inside a 700-pound box of almost pure titanium to protect it from the radiation around Jupiter. Even with that protection we only expect the instruments to last about two years; the radiation is that intense.

Jeet Ki Janib - The One Thing (Book) | Qasim Ali Shah

In this video, Qasim Ali Shah talking about on the topic "". He is also sharing his experience, wisdom and knowledge that will be helpful for all of those who want to know about it. ===== ABOUT Qasim Ali Shah ===== Qasim Ali Shah is a Public Speaker- Teacher- Writer- Corporate Trainer & Leader for every age group- Businessmen- Corporate executives- Employees- Students- Housewives- Networkers- Sportsmen and for all who wish everlasting Success- Happiness- Peace and Personal Growth. He helps people to change their belief & thought pattern- experience less stress and more success in their lives through better communication- positive thinking and spiritual knowledge. ===== FOLLOW ME ON THE SOCIALS ===== - Qasim Ali Shah: https://goo.gl/6BKcxu - Google+: https://goo.gl/uPyGvT - Twitter: https://goo.gl/78MVoA - Website : https://goo.gl/Tgjy6u ===== Team Member: Waqas Nasir =====

Pablo Escobar’s hippos: Why drug lords shouldn’t play God | Lucy Cooke

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink So, a few years ago I went to go and investigate rumors of hippos, rogue hippos running riot in rural Columbia. Now hippos don’t naturally live in South America, they are from sub-Saharan Africa; but these hippos had been transported to Colombia by Pablo Escobar. So Pablo Escobar, like many powerful men, fancied himself as a bit of a Noah’s Ark, a kind of twisted Noah, in fact, and he wanted to build his own menagerie at Hacienda Napoles, which was his ranch where he controlled his drug empire in between Bogotá and Medellín in the Andes in Colombia. And legend has it that he gathered together this menagerie by stealing a Russian cargo plane, flying it (or having it flown) to Africa where he loaded it up with loads of illegal wildlife, and then had to get it back to Colombia before the tranquilized animals woke up. And amongst this cargo of creatures was one male hippo that was nicknamed el Viejo, and three females. And he transplanted these enormous beasts into a pond at his Hacienda, and they loved it. It turns out that Colombia is a hippo paradise, because actually all hippos really want is some nice shallow water to wallow around in and plenty of grass to eat, and Colombia has plenty of that. It also has no other hippos, so no other competition, and no natural predators. So the hippos flourished in their new paradise and very quickly the four became eight, became 12, became 16. And what happens with hippos is you have a male who has a harem, so every time one of el Viejo’s sons reached sexual maturity he would boot him out of the pond, and that young male hippo would then head off in search of hippo love elsewhere. Now of course in Africa this is completely normal and hippos head off from their family group and young males will go in search of hippo love and start their own family. But of course in Colombia there are no hippos out there. So these males, these young males are being spirited away from Hacienda Napoles in one of the many, many rivers in that part of Colombia, which acts like sort of hippo superhighways, so they’re sort of pinging them out into the countryside and then they arrive and they can’t find a mate. They’re quite cantankerous beasts at the best of times, but these are sort of frustrated horny male hippos desperately looking for love where there is none. I went to Colombia to investigate this story and visited one of these rogue males that had installed himself in a pond next to a kindergarten. I met the kids from the school who told me that they no longer liked to bathe in that particular pond—too right! And one of them told me about how his grandmother had been chased by the love-lorn beast for quite some time earlier in the week. So they’re kind of running amok basically. So what do you do with this situation? You’ve got rapidly multiplying hippos—and the extraordinary thing about what’s happening in Colombia is it’s changing their behavior, because in Africa you have this very fierce dry season, which puts the brakes on hippo reproduction. So I think they reach sexual maturity, I can’t remember it’s like five or seven years let’s say, but in Colombia they were reaching sexual maturity significantly earlier and having babies every year instead of every two years. So they were multiplying at this much faster rate because they didn’t have the same constraints on them that they do in Africa, so you’ve got a bit of a problem; you’ve got a massive invasive species. Now with most invasive species the solution is to get rid of them, because basically they upset ecosystems and so they need to be removed. But the problem with hippos though is that they star in Disney movies. So there was this sort of rogue male, and the first one that they put down there was a public outcry, and so they had to come up with a different plan. And I met with the Colombian vet who was in charge of implementing the radical plan B, which was the castration program. So Carlos Valderrama was given the onerous task of having to castrate one of these rogue males.

Being black in the US vs the UK: There's a big difference | Alvin Hall

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Alvin Hall: Two facts. One, I define myself as a black man first, because that’s what you’re going to see when you look at me. Being gay is something I define myself second, third, I can’t decide really. But it’s not everything I am. It’s a part of a complexity that I am. And that’s not backing away from the fact that I’m gay. It’s just that there are other aspects of my personality which are much more important to me and how I negotiate the world. My career in the UK and other parts of the world really came about because someone there saw my talent at being able to talk about money, personal finance, cultural issues, and my curiosity, and opened the door for me. I don’t think that I would have had the same opportunity in the United States. Why not? Partly because when people look at me they don’t see my skill sets and they’re always filtered through their own prejudice. In the UK and other parts of the world – not all but many – people will give you credit. They’ll give you the opportunity— even if it’s the opportunity to fail, but it’s an opportunity that you can turn into success. I don’t think that what happened with my career in the United Kingdom would have happened for me in America. I don’t think that the affection that the people in the UK have for me would have come to me in America. I think that people saw my curiosity, saw my hunger, saw my ability to talk about things honestly and openly, and genuinely and they appreciated that. I will never know why we couldn’t convince Americans to embrace that side of me and I stop - and many years ago I stopped wondering. I just stopped. When I use the term “coded” I mean when people know and don’t know they are bigoted, racist, or generally prejudiced but they try to hide it. So you have to be very much aware of eye movements, facial tics, hand movement, body language, even sometime word choices, because that word choice can often telescope to you, suddenly, exactly what you’re dealing with. And often the people who use those terms are so unaware that they don’t even know the import of what they’re saying. But if you know that means you can adjust yourself to the situation. They are not likely to change, and you will gain nothing by calling them out on it except next time it’ll be more subtle. So often when I see it, I adjust me because as I learned from that therapist many years ago, it’s me I have to change. It’s me I have to alter, not them.

Do Relationships NEED Labels?

Why do we feel the need to define anything related to romantic relationships? Hannah Cranston and Jason Carter discuss what types of labels we ACTUALLY need in relationships. Let us know how YOU define the relationship with your partner in the comments below. Don't forget guys, if you like this video please "Like," "Favorite," and "Share" it with your friends to show your support - it really helps us out! If there's something you'd like to see us discuss on the show, tweet us about it! See you tomorrow :) ***************************************************** Every day ThinkTank challenges preconceptions expose amazing new facts and discoveries, explores different perspectives, and inspires you to learn more about the world and the people around you. Feed your brain with new videos every day at 12 pm Eastern/9am Pacific! SUBSCRIBE or you'll miss out! https://ift.tt/O8HfZ3