Nelson Mandela Digital Archives Now Online
Via Memeburn:
Google and the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) have created a new Nelson Mandela Digital Archive on the web that is freely accessible to the world.
Google donated about US$1.25-million to the Johannesburg-based Centre in 2011 to help preserve and digitise thousands of archival documents, photographs and videos about Mandela.
Along with historians, educationalists, researchers and activists, users from around the world now have access to extensive information about the life and legacy of this extraordinary African statesman.
The new online multimedia archive includes Mandela’s correspondence with family, comrades and friends, diaries written during his 27 years of imprisonment, and notes he made while leading the negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa.
The archive will also include the earliest-known photograph of Mandela, rare images of his cell on Robben Island in the 1970s, and never-seen drafts of Mandela’s manuscripts for the sequel to his autobiography “Long Walk to Freedom.”
Nelson Mandela Digital Archive.
Image: Warrants of Commital (document #1 front), 11/7/1962.
This item consists of 1 Warrant of Committal issued to Nelson Mandela by the Magistrate’s Court of South Africa. The warrant contains Nelson Mandela’s fingerprints. Via the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive.
The Four Ages of the Universe — What’s Next?
The Greek poet Hesiod described the Five Ages of Man in mythology.
They progress from the Golden Age, when people lived among the gods, through the warlike Bronze Age and on to the Heroic Age. His narrative ends with the Iron Age, a period of toil and misery for mankind.
Science has now replaced these mythologies. We are at the point where we look at the entire universe as a grand series of game-changing leaps toward our emergence as an intelligent species. It is an epic story more compelling than anything from creation mythology.
As several recent studies highlight, the way most of us spend our mornings is exactly counter to the conditions that neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us promote flexible, open-minded thinking. Take that hurried wake-up, for example. In a study published in the journal Thinking and Reasoning last year, researchers Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks reported that imaginative insights are most likely to come to us when we’re groggy and unfocused. The mental processes that inhibit distracting or irrelevant thoughts are at their weakest in these moments, allowing unexpected and sometimes inspired connections to be made. Sleepy people’s “more diffuse attentional focus,” they write, leads them to “widen their search though their knowledge network. This widening leads to an increase in creative problem solving.” By not giving yourself time to tune into your meandering mind, you’re missing out on the surprising solutions it may offer. […]
And while we all should read up on what’s going on in the world, it may be better to put that news website or newspaper aside until after the day’s work is done. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science found that subjects who watched brief video clips that made them feel sad were less able to solve problems creatively than people who watched an upbeat video. […]
So what would our mornings look like if we re-engineered them in the interest of maximizing our creative problem-solving capacities? We’d set the alarm a few minutes early and lie awake in bed, following our thoughts where they lead (with a pen and paper nearby to jot down any evanescent inspirations.) We’d stand a little longer under the warm water of the shower, dismissing task-oriented thoughts (“What will I say at that 9 a.m. meeting?”) in favor of a few more minutes of mental dilation. We’d take some deep breaths during our commute, instead of succumbing to road rage. And once in the office — after we get that cup of coffee — we’d direct our computer browser not to the news of the day but to the funniest videos the web has to offer.
Good luck with that.
