1. It Trivializes Violent Historical Oppression

Constellations and the Calendar

Did you recently hear that NASA changed the zodiac signs? Nope, we definitely didn’t…

…Here at NASA, we study astronomy, not astrology. We didn’t change any zodiac signs, we just did the math. Here are the details:

First Things First: Astrology is NOT Astronomy…

Astronomy is the scientific study of everything in outer space. Astronomers and other scientists know that stars many light years away have no effect on the ordinary activities of humans on Earth.

Astrology is something else. It’s not science. No one has shown that astrology can be used to predict the future or describe what people are like based on their birth dates.

Some curious symbols ring the outside of the Star Finder. These symbols stand for some of the constellations in the zodiac. What is the zodiac and what is special about these constellations?

Imagine a straight line drawn from Earth though the sun and out into space way beyond our solar system where the stars are. Then, picture Earth following its orbit around the sun. This imaginary line would rotate, pointing to different stars throughout one complete trip around the sun – or, one year. All the stars that lie close to the imaginary flat disk swept out by this imaginary line are said to be in the zodiac.

The constellations in the zodiac are simply the constellations that this imaginary straight line points to in its year-long journey.

What are Constellations?

A constellation is group of stars like a dot-to-dot puzzle. If you join the dots—stars, that is—and use lots of imagination, the picture would look like an object, animal, or person. For example, Orion is a group of stars that the Greeks thought looked like a giant hunter with a sword attached to his belt. Other than making a pattern in Earth’s sky, these stars may not be related at all.

Even the closest star is almost unimaginably far away. Because they are so far away, the shapes and positions of the constellations in Earth’s sky change very, very slowly. During one human lifetime, they change hardly at all.

A Long History of Looking to the Stars

The Babylonians lived over 3,000 years ago. They divided the zodiac into 12 equal parts – like cutting a pizza into 12 equal slices. They picked 12 constellations in the zodiac, one for each of the 12 “slices.” So, as Earth orbits the sun, the sun would appear to pass through each of the 12 parts of the zodiac. Since the Babylonians already had a 12-month calendar (based on the phases of the moon), each month got a slice of the zodiac all to itself.

But even according to the Babylonians’ own ancient stories, there were 13 constellations in the zodiac. So they picked one, Ophiuchus, to leave out. Even then, some of the chosen 12 didn’t fit neatly into their assigned slice of the pie and crossed over into the next one.

When the Babylonians first invented the 12 signs of zodiac, a birthday between about July 23 and August 22 meant being born under the constellation Leo. Now, 3,000 years later, the sky has shifted because Earth’s axis (North Pole) doesn’t point in quite the same direction.

The constellations are different sizes and shapes, so the sun spends different lengths of time lined up with each one. The line from Earth through the sun points to Virgo for 45 days, but it points to Scorpius for only 7 days.  To make a tidy match with their 12-month calendar, the Babylonians ignored the fact that the sun actually moves through 13 constellations, not 12. Then they assigned each of those 12 constellations equal amounts of time.

So, we didn’t change any zodiac signs…we just did the math.

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Today’s ‪#‎dalithistory‬ month post is on the Adi-movements of the 1920’s and 30s. For Dalit history, ‘Adi’ ideologies are highly significant as they bear testament to some of our earliest assertion of equal rights, humanity and citizenship on level with other castes.

By the late 19th century, leaders like the social reformer Jyotirao Phule, had created a powerful anti-caste space, upholding non-Brahmanical thought and presenting the dream of a new egalitarian value system on which to model society on. Soon after, the early 20th century saw several archeological discoveries being made in Mohenjodaro and Harappa in the North, pointing to the existence of an unexpectedly ancient civilization that was likely much older than Aryan migrations. These discoveries struck a profound chord with Dalits all over the subcontinent, who immediately began to identify as an indigenous population who were conquered and subsequently oppressed by an alien religion. Although, the evidence for Aryan conquests remains contested, these interpretation was so compelling that such “Adi” (Ancient/Old/Original) movements sprung up all over the nation completely independently of each other.  

The names of these movements are telling -  Ad-Dharm in Punjab, Adi-Hindu in U.P. and Hyderabad, Adi-Dravida, Adi-Andhra and Adi-Karnataka in South India - all indicating a common claim to nativity and original inhabitation.

The provocative effects of the Adi-movements are best illustrated by an early Maharashtrian pre-Ambedkar Dalit leader, Kisan Faguji Bansode, who warned his caste-Hindu friends in 1909, stating: “The Aryans - your ancestors - conquered us and gave us unbearable harassment. At that time we were your conquest, you treated us worse than slaves and subjected us to any torture you wanted. But now we are no longer your subjects, we have no service relationship with you, we are not your slaves or serfs… We have had enough of the harassment and torture of the Hindus.”

In Andhra, the process was accelerated by the commercialized coastal areas that produced both a mobile Dalit agricultural class and a small educated section that produced leaders Bhagyareddy Varma and Arigyay Ramswamy who managed to mobilize nearly a third of the Malas and Madigas of the Madras Presidency to state their identity in the official census of 1931 as Adi-Andhra.

In Tamil Nadu, some Dalits identified themselves as Adi-Dravidas while Telugu and Kannada counterparts also identified as Adi-Hindu or Adi-Karnataka. In the north, in Uttar Pradesh, an untouchable ascetic, who radically called himself Acchutananda, began to organize an Adi-Hindu identity, arguing, “The untouchables, are in fact Adi-Hindu, i.e. the original and autochthonous Nagas or Dasas of the north and the Dravidas of the south, the undisputed, heavenly owners of Bharat.”

In Punjab, Mangoo Ram Mugowalia, a Dalit who had left the Gaddar movement, unable to stand the Casteism within it, began the Ad-Dharmi movement. By 1926, he had influenced a huge number of Dalits to boldly register themselves a separate “quaum” (religious group) in Hoshiarpur despite the threat of imminent violence. By the 1931 census, nearly 500,000 Dalits registered themselves as Ad-Dharmis all over Punjab.

To counter a growing ‘Adi’ consensus, Brahmins began actively renaming Dalits, ‘Panchama’ (the Fifth). Gandhi used it in his Young India for a long time. Many Dalits of the day strongly pushed back against the term insisting the idea of ‘Panchama’ was derogatory and only served to attenuate the age-long hyper-oppressive framework of Hindu society and solidify their position outside the caste order.

#TryBeatingMeLightly Shows Pakistani Women Won’t Stand For Wife-Beating Bill

“You should socialize.” “Aren’t you lonely?” “So, you’re socially awkward?" These are a few of the things introverts hear quite often. Thankfully we have Tumblr, which has time and again nailed the emotions, perks and struggles of having an introverted personality. Like this perfect GIF for dealing with small talk.

Now that we’ve left behind the philosophy of religion, it’s time to start exploring what other ways might exist to find meaning in the world. Today we explore essentialism and its response: existentialism. We’ll also learn about Jean-Paul Sartre and his ideas about how to find meaning in a meaningless world.

Keep reading

Nearly half a century after Roe, it’s time the media stops treating abortion like something taboo and start treating it like what it is – an important and normal part of life for a huge portion of Americans.

Empathy for others’ pain rooted in cognition rather than sensation

The ability to understand and empathize with others’ pain is grounded in cognitive neural processes rather than sensory ones, according to the results of a new study led by University of Colorado Boulder researchers.

The findings show that the act of perceiving others’ pain (i.e., empathy for others’ pain) does not appear to involve the same neural circuitry as experiencing pain in one’s own body, suggesting that they are different interactions within the brain.

“The research suggests that empathy is a deliberative process that requires taking another person’s perspective rather than being an instinctive, automatic process,” said Tor Wager, the senior author of the study, director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU-Boulder.

A study detailing the results was published online today in the journal eLife.

Empathy is a key cornerstone of human social behavior, but the complex neural interactions underlying this behavior are not yet fully understood. Previous hypotheses have suggested that the same brain regions that allow humans to feel pain in their own bodies might activate when perceiving the pain of others.

To test this idea, the researchers compared patterns of brain activity in human volunteers as they experienced moderate pain directly (via heat, shock, or pressure) in one experimental session, and watched images of others’ hands or feet being injured in another experimental session. When volunteers watched images, they were asked to try to imagine that the injuries were happening to their own bodies.

The researchers found that the brain patterns when the volunteers observed pain did not overlap with the brain patterns when the volunteers experienced pain themselves. Instead, while observing pain, the volunteers showed brain patterns consistent with mentalizing, which involves imagining another person’s thoughts and intentions.

The results suggest that within the brain, the experience of observing someone else in pain is neurologically distinct from that of experiencing physical pain oneself.

“Most previous studies focused only on the points of similarity between these two distinct experiences in a few isolated brain regions while ignoring dissimilarities. Our new study used a more granular analysis method,” said Anjali Krishnan, the lead author of the study and a post-doctoral research associate in the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU-Boulder while the research was conducted. She is currently an assistant professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

This new analysis method identified an empathy-predictive brain pattern that can be applied to new individuals to obtain a brain-related ‘vicarious pain score,’ opening new possibilities for measuring the strength of activity in brain systems that contribute to empathy.

The results may open new avenues of inquiry into how the brain regions involved in empathy help humans to relate to others when they experience different types of pain. Future studies may also explore the factors that influence one’s ability to adopt another’s perspective and whether it might be possible to improve this ability.

it is very very important for boys to know that:

you’re allowed to express your discomfort and hurt

you’re allowed to speak up and defend yourself

your emotions are valid

you’re not a bad person 

you’re not ugly

you don’t have to laugh at sexist jokes just because everyone is laughing

you’re not inferior to girls

you are loved

the stereotypes that mainstream media portray you as are untrue

only you know what it’s like to be you, everyone else is just looking in from the outside

you’re not a bad person, and people are going to try and make you feel like you are, but you’re not

Richard Feynman (above) included a poem in his address to the National Academy of Sciences:

I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think. 

There are the rushing waves mountains of molecules each stupidly minding its own business trillions apart yet forming white surf in unison Ages on ages before any eyes could see year after year thunderously pounding the shore as now. For whom, for what? On a dead planet with no life to entertain. Never at rest tortured by energy wasted prodigiously by the Sun poured into space. A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts. Growing in size and complexity living things masses of atoms DNA, protein dancing a pattern ever more intricate. Out of the cradle onto dry land here it is standing: atoms with consciousness; matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering: I a universe of atoms an atom in the Universe.

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The Migration of Anatomically Modern Humans

In paleoanthropology, the recent African origin of modern humans, frequently dubbed the “Out of Africa” theory, is the most widely accepted model describing the geographic origin and early migration of anatomically modern humans. The concept was speculative until the 1980s, when it was corroborated by a study of present-day mitochondrial DNA, combined with evidence based on physical anthropology of archaic specimens.

Genetic studies and fossil evidence show that archaic Homo sapiens evolved to anatomically modern humans solely in Africa, between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago, that members of one branch of Homo sapiens left Africa by between 125,000 and 60,000 years ago, and that over time these humans replaced earlier human populations such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus. The date of the earliest successful “out of Africa” migration (earliest migrants with living descendants) has generally been placed at 60,000 years ago as suggested by genetics, although migration out of the continent may have taken place as early as 125,000 years ago according to Arabian archaeology finds of tools in the region. Read More