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Very educational, thanks for sharing!

Brilliant. That’s @catandgirl for anyone looking for something to follow on the Fediverse. :)

Looks like Latin to me.

Oh wow!

I always assumed it was connected to the word “by” as used in “by and by”, so that it would basically mean “have a good afterwards”.

Cool stuff. Bob Dylan makes more sense to me now:

And goodbye is too good a word babe
So I’ll just say fare thee well

Bingo!

Christmas traditions are a fun mix of things. The modern Santa Claus is mostly a mix of Saint Nicholas and a bunch of continental European traditions, but the pointy red hat is the product of being what we refer to as a nisse - a mythical creature closely related to gnomes.

We have long traditions of leaving food out for the nisse living in the barn for Christmas. And Santa is not named after Saint Nicholas over here - we call him julenissen. The Christmas gnome, if you will.

In Scandinavia we never stopped calling the holiday by it’s pagan name - jul.

We’ve been told for a thousand years now that it’s somehow supposed to refer to the birth of Christ, but the celebration is older than Christianity and nobody knows for sure the origin of it’s name. As far as me and my family is concerned, it’s a pagan holiday.

Happy to celebrate with my Christian friends though, there’s nothing wrong with being inclusive.

God jul!

Looks like someone did a complete 3D render or something. It’s pretty different from the original.

Still relatable, seems to get more true the higher education you enter into.

If you want luck you’re probably better off handing typewriters to monkeys.

The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps. ♪

I mean, it’s a challenging hypothesis to prove. I might just be pessimistic.

I think there is some reason for valid concern though. The New York Times memoriam for Clifford Nass is an interesting and somewhat worrying read.

Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.

Maybe more practically, it’s just hard to argue America wouldn’t be in a better place right now if it wasn’t for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.

Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.

It’s been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn’t stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.

Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That’s why it’s useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.