What Makes People Tick?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of books focusing on religion and spirituality. Books written by believers and practitioners, but also books written by outsiders and scholars - religious tourists, sociologists, anthropologists... One thing that strikes me over and over is that so many accounts from different religions have common elements or are even a re-telling of the same story but updated or changed to reflect the history, religion, language or culture of the ones telling the story. Reading accounts from different religions in regions that, as far as we know, never interacted before white Europeans started sailing around the world, laying claim to lands that were never theirs to lay claim to, and seeing how similar these accounts are, how many common factors there are, it makes me realise that when it comes to how we view religion and the divine, when it comes to the stories we tell regarding not just our own creation but the creation of the world and all living beings, we are ...

It is time for humans the world over to unite. It is time for us to come together through the Internet, through Social Media and through Technology. It is time for us to come together and collectively say NO. It is time for us to come together and collectively say NO to war, NO to corruption, NO to consumerism, NO to living in a plastic-fantastic society, NO to intolerance and the spreading of misinformation, NO to governments not delivering on their promises, NO to religious intolerance, NO to discrimination, NO to rape, NO to torture, NO to inequality, NO to hunger, NO to living a life dedicated to the pursuit of material things and NO to one more person having to live in poverty or suffer for one more day. It is time to come together, to collectively stand up for what matters and to tell those who care more for money and power than people and the planet that they need to WAKE UP before it is too late. The internet, social media and instant global communication as we know the...

Vox.com presents an interesting article with 40 maps that show the start and spread of the internet. It looks like it all started in America, spreading from there to Europe and beyond. Reading this article made me wonder - didn't Dan Brown once write that the internet started at CERN? (Or some part of the technology that makes the internet possible anyway... Heck, it was a long, long time ago that I read his books...) "The internet increasingly pervades our lives, delivering information to us no matter where we are. It takes a complex system of cables, servers, towers, and other infrastructure, developed over decades, to allow us to stay in touch with our friends and family so effortlessly. Here are 40 maps that will help you better understand the internet — where it came from, how it works, and how it's used by people around the world." Source:  40 maps that explain the internet , Vox.com Maps 14 and 15 shows domain names around the world. The first map shows E...