Monday, October 30, 2006
Beauty
Beauty is a value associated with an innate and emotional perception of life's affirmative and meaningful aspects within objects in the perceived world —ie. vitality, fertility, health, happiness, goodness, and love. Cognition of "beauty" involves the interpretation of objects as being in balance and harmony with nature, which in turn elicits a sense and experience of attraction, affection, and pleasure.
In its most profound sense, beauty is said to engender a salient experience of positive reflection with regard to the meaning of one's own being within natural life. An "object of beauty" may be anything that reveals or resonates with a personal meaning. Hence religious and moral teachings have often focused on the divinity and virtue of beauty, to assert natural beauty as an aspect of a spiritual beauty and to define all self-centered or materialistic pretensions as based in ignorance.
The ancient story of Narcissus for example, deals with the distinction between recognizing beauty and falling into vanity. The presence of the self in any human context means that beauty is naturally tied to its human meaning, wherein human beauty is often the dominant aspect of a greater natural beauty. Otherwise, objects can be defined as belonging to any of various types, such as artificial, or intellectual beauty.
Friday, October 20, 2006
The meanings of naturism and nudism are very similar, and refer to a cultural and political movement practicing,advocating and defending social nudity in private and public spaces. Several other terms have been proposed as a replacement of these terms, but none has yet found the same wide-spread acceptance as the older terms naturism and nudism.The movement includes a large range of variants including naturism, nudism, Freikörperkultur (FKK), the free beach movement as well as generalized public lands/public nudity advocacy. While there is a large amount of shared history and common themes, issues and philosophy, differences between these separate movements are sometimes contentious.
The usage of these terms varies geographically; people in the US often prefer the term nudism, while people in Europe more often than not refer to themselves as naturists. The predominant movement centers on established, family-friendly, non-sexualized variations. The inclusion of the topfree equality movement within this movement is under debate. Use of the word "clothes free" has also been used when preceding other words as a descriptive term, some arguing that it allows more inclusion of both the naturist and nudist philosophy, which are arguably similar in many regards.The movement also works in parallel to and sometimes influences and is influenced by popular culture as well as individuals and activists as well as organizations .
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Microbiology
Microbiology is the study of microorganisms, which are unicellular or cell-cluster microscopic organisms. This includes eukaryotes with a nucleus such as fungi and protists, and prokaryotes without a nucleus such as bacteria and viruses though viruses are not strictly classed as living organisms.
Although much is now known in the field of microbiology, advances are being made regularly. The most common estimates suggest that we have studied only about 1% of all of the microbes in any given environment. Thus, despite the fact that over three hundred years have passed since the discovery of microbes, the field of microbiology is clearly in its infancy relative to other biological disciplines such as zoology, botany or even entomology.
The field of bacteriology later a subdiscipline of microbiology is generally considered to have been founded by Ferdinand Cohn (1828-1898), a botanist whose studies on algae and photosynthetic bacteria led him to describe several bacteria including Bacillus and Beggiatoa. Ferdinand Cohn was also the first to formulate a scheme for the taxonomic classification of bacteria.
