Executive Order 10730, September 24, 1957

—via todaysdocument

President Dwight Eisenhower issued this executive order to enforce his Presidential Proclamation 3204, from the previous day.   Intended to restore peace and order during the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, Eisenhower’s order placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and sent 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division to assist them.

Reblogged from Today's Document

As a defense against the Witch-doctory of Hegel, who claimed universal omniscience, the scientist was offered the combined neo-mystic Witch-doctory and Attila-ism of the Logical Positivists. They assured him that such concepts as metaphysics or existence or reality or thing or matter or mind are meaningless—let the mystics care whether they exist or not, a scientist does not have to know it; the task of theoretical science is the manipulation of symbols, and scientists are the special elite whose symbols have the magic power of making reality conform to their will (“matter is that which fits mathematical equations”). Knowledge, they said, consists, not of facts, but of words, words unrelated to objects, words of an arbitrary social convention, as an irreducible primary; thus knowledge is merely a matter of manipulating language. The job of scientists, they said, is not the study of reality, but the creation of arbitrary constructs by means of arbitrary sounds, and any construct is as valid as another, since the criterion of validity is only “convenience” and the definition of science is “that which the scientists do.” But this omnipotent power, surpassing the dreams of ancient numerologists or of medieval alchemists, was granted to the scientist by philosophical Attila-ism on two conditions: a. that he never claim certainty for his knowledge, since certainty is unknown to man, and that he claim, instead, “percentages of probability,” not troubling himself with such questions as how one calculates percentages of the unknowable; b. that he claim as absolute knowledge the proposition that all values lie outside the sphere of science, that reason is impotent to deal with morality, that moral values are a matter of subjective choice, dictated by one’s feelings, not one’s mind.

Reblogged from Letters To My Country

Scientists Glimpse Images In Your Mind

TPM IdeaLab

Reading another person’s mind is impossible. But it is now possible to see what’s going on in there visually, thanks to scientists at the University of California-Berkeley, who on Thursday announced they had managed to decode the brain signals of three individuals into watchable movies. YouTube movies, to be exact.

The team of neuroscience researchers led by UC professor Jack Gallant accomplished the incredible feat using an MRI machine to record the brain signals of three subjects - three members of their research team, in fact - while the subjects watched movie trailers.

Then, the team took the recorded brain signals and ran them through a database of 18-million-seconds of random YouTube clips, but specifically didn’t include clips of the trailers that the subjects had been watching in the first place.

Berkley’s computer program was able to pick out new clips visually similar to the subjects’ brain imagery and mash them together into composites, creating eerie, hallucinatory new movies that replicate with startling accuracy the exact scenes that subjects saw in the trailers, frame-for-frame.

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vruz: oh look, there’s offensive communistic-vietcong-muslim-northkorean-indigenousamerican-mexican-martian images in your mind!  pre-emptively sent to jail!


Saturday morning. Our hero starts his day with his characteristic,  proven dynamism.

lectorconstante sez:Sábado naciente. Nuestro héroe inicia la jornada con su característico y probado dinamismo.

(lo pinta Antonio López)

Reblogged from Lector Constante