Topic Review
The Amazing Meeting
The Amazing Meeting (TAM), stylized as The Amaz!ng Meeting, was an annual conference that focused on science, skepticism, and critical thinking. The conference started in 2003 and was sponsored by the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Perennial speakers included Penn & Teller, Phil Plait, Michael Shermer and James "The Amazing" Randi. Speakers at the four-day conference were selected from a variety of disciplines including scientific educators, magicians, and community activists. Outside the plenary sessions the conference included workshops, additional panel discussions, music and magic performances and live taping of podcasts including The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. The final Amazing Meeting was held in July 2015.
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  • 09 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Terma (Religion)
Terma (Tibetan: གཏེར་མ་, Wylie: gter ma; "hidden treasure") are various forms of hidden teachings that are key to Vajrayana or Tibetan Buddhist and Bon religious traditions. The belief is that these teachings were originally esoterically hidden by various adepts such as Padmasambhava and dakini such as Yeshe Tsogyal (consorts) during the 8th century, for future discovery at auspicious times by other adepts, who are known as tertöns. As such, terma represent a tradition of continuous revelation in Vajrayana or Tibetan Buddhism. Termas are a part of tantric literature.
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  • 26 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Tears in Rain Monologue
"Tears in rain" (also known as the "C-Beams Speech") is a monologue delivered by character Roy Batty (portrayed by Rutger Hauer) in the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner. Written by David Peoples and altered by Hauer from the scripted lines the night before filming, the monologue is frequently quoted; critic Mark Rowlands described it as "perhaps the most moving death soliloquy in cinematic history". The speech appears as the last track on the film's soundtrack album.
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  • 03 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Tapas (Indian Religions)
Tapas (Sanskrit: तपस्) is a variety of austere spiritual meditation practices in Indian religions. In Jainism, it means asceticism (austerities, body mortification); in Buddhism, it denotes spiritual practices including meditation and self-discipline; and in the different traditions within Hinduism it means a spectrum of practices ranging from asceticism, inner cleansing to self-discipline by meditation practices. The Tapas practice often involves solitude, and is a part of monastic practices that are believed to be a means to moksha (liberation, salvation). In the Vedas literature of Hinduism, fusion words based on tapas are widely used to expound several spiritual concepts that develop through heat or inner energy, such as meditation, any process to reach special observations and insights, the spiritual ecstasy of a yogin or Tāpasa (a vṛddhi derivative meaning "a practitioner of austerities, an ascetic"), even warmth of sexual intimacy. In certain contexts, the term means penance, pious activity, as well as severe meditation.
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  • 27 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Taiji
Taiji or Tai chi (simplified Chinese: 太极; traditional Chinese: 太極; pinyin: tàijí; literally: 'great pole') is a Chinese cosmological term for the "Supreme Ultimate" state of undifferentiated absolute and infinite potential, the oneness before duality, from which Yin and Yang originate. It can be compared with the old Wuji (無極, "without pole"). The term Taiji and its other spelling T'ai chi (using Wade–Giles as opposed to Pinyin) are most commonly used in the West to refer to Taijiquan (or T'ai chi ch'uan, 太極拳), an internal martial art, Chinese meditation system and health practice. This article, however, refers only to the use of the term in Chinese philosophy and in Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.
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  • 24 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Sustainable Development in Higher Education
Higher education institutions (HEIs) are not insulated from the challenges facing the planet and have been tasked as key stakeholders in sustainable development (SD). Over the last five decades, there has been a shift toward the categories of SD work that necessitate a collaborative culture that is not traditionally inherent in HEIs. It is offered that when HEIs align their institutional capacities with worldwide efforts to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) by 2030 and foster an intentionally collaborative culture, they will become better equipped to face their own unique challenges: becoming “changemaker” universities; collaborating with each other in the knowledge economy; placing students at the center of the teaching and learning process; and fulfilling their “third mission” to partner with external stakeholders and society.
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  • 07 Feb 2022
Topic Review
Survivor Guilt
Survivor guilt (or survivor's guilt; also called survivor syndrome or survivor's syndrome and survivor disorder or survivor's disorder) is a mental condition that occurs when a person believes they have done something wrong by surviving a traumatic or tragic event when others did not, often feeling self-guilt. The experience and manifestation of survivor's guilt will depend on an individual's psychological profile. When the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM-IV) was published, survivor guilt was removed as a recognized specific diagnosis, and redefined as a significant symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It may be found among survivors of combat, epidemics, murder, natural disasters, rape, terrorism, accidents, among the friends and family of those who have died by suicide, and in non-mortal situations.
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  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Superficiality
The discourses in philosophy regarding social relation. What social psychologists call "the principle of superficiality versus depth" has pervaded Western culture since at least the time of Plato.
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  • 27 Sep 2022
Topic Review
Stylite
A stylite (from Greek στυλίτης, stylitēs, "pillar dweller", derived from στῦλος, stylos, "pillar", Classical Syriac: ܐܣܛܘܢܐ‎ ʼasṯonáyé) or pillar-saint is a type of Christian ascetic who lives on pillars, preaching, fasting and praying. Stylites believe that the mortification of their bodies would help ensure the salvation of their souls. Stylites were common in the early days of the Byzantine Empire. The first known stylite was Simeon Stylites the Elder who climbed a pillar in Syria in 423 and remained there until his death 37 years later.
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  • 29 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Stereotype Space
In functional analysis and related areas of mathematics, stereotype spaces are topological vector spaces defined by a special variant of reflexivity condition. They form a class of spaces with a series of remarkable properties, in particular, this class is very wide (for instance, it contains all Fréchet spaces and thus, all Banach spaces), it consists of spaces satisfying a natural condition of completeness, and it forms a cosmos and a *-autonomous category with the standard analytical tools for constructing new spaces, like taking dual spaces, spaces of operators, tensor products, products and coproducts, limits and colimits, and in addition, immediate subspaces, and immediate quotient spaces.
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  • 10 Nov 2022
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