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rodbank13 · 3 years

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Japanese Nightlife

Because of this, it is extremely essential to exercise precaution, and to know what issues to focus on when partying till morning in Roppongi. Truth being advised, you'll be able to stroll round Roppongi previous midnight without feeling that your security is in danger. Ergo, and in a nutshell, Roppongi would never be considered a scary place if it were positioned in another place on the planet. Roppongi is definitely not the identical now because it was years ago since it has seen a constructive change within the final decade after locals and politicians decided to wash up the mess that was occurring there. Despite this, the district remains to be largely associated with crime. Rooms differ in dimension and elegance whereas the decor is determined by how a lot you're willing to pay; the costlier it is, the extra shade and decorations you will notice, and vise-versa. The TV and karaoke equipment will be at one finish of the room with seats alongside the edges and a desk in the middle. Food and drinks can be ordered by phone and sometimes a free drink is included in the payment. Yatai or Japanese food stands are home to cheap and tasty Japanese Food. They normally operate through the night till midnight to offer food within the streets of Japan. Street foods similar to gyoza, takoyaki, and dango are in style treats which could be bought at a yatai. One 12 Months In Japan The prime highlights include boat rides on the lake, viewing plenty of cherry trees, and consuming plenty of meals from the food stalls. Setsubun marks the beginning of spring in accordance with the old lunar calendar in Japan. In the story, a celestial princess and cow herder fell in love but the two had been then separated by the Sky King. Eventually, the Sky King relented and the 2 lovers had been allowed to see one another at some point a yr. To expertise the Buddhist ritual of joya no kane , head to Zojoji, an enormous Buddhist temple in Tokyo. You can even see the celebration in Tokyo's Koenji neighborhood which places on a a lot smaller show but still attracts over 1,000,000 visitors every year. All festival-goers are invited to affix in the vigorous procession of dancers, offered they wear the standard haneto dancer’s costume . As the story goes, the three founders devoted their lives to Buddhism after catching a small statue of the Boddhisatva Kannon in Tokyo’s Sumida River whereas fishing one morning, back in the 7th century. While the pageant has possibly been round in some form since around that point, the shrine itself has solely been round since 1649. Sanja Matsuri is another boisterous shinto pageant, held on the third Sunday of May in Tokyo’s old style Asakusa district. If you’re in the trip-planning process and curious whether your travel dates overlap with any nice festivals, right here is an up-to-date listing of notable matsuri happening all through Japan . Although each of the common public holidays throughout Golden Week aren't huge occasions by themselves, combined they provide a good opportunity for native residents to shut store and take a while off. At house, families throw beans in mame-maki ceremonies to drive away evil spirits that could foul up issues later. Japanese Family Journey Visit the museum to search out out where the movies have been initially created and even watch a brief animated feature, earlier than venturing up to the rooftop backyard, the place a 5 meter excessive robotic stands guard. If you are trying to embark on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Japan, we've sources that can assist. Start by checking out our pattern journey itineraries and learning about our trip-planning course of. We believe your trip should be a reflection of your private sense of adventure and elegance, and that no two families (or itineraries!) are alike. A key to a successful family vacation is ensuring everybody — dad and mom included — feels included and engaged. Restaurants can be costly or surprisingly low-cost, relying on where you go. Avoid the busy buying malls and look for smaller restaurants hidden in alleyways. It helps others expertise, and recommendations of the country! Thank you a lot, and I hope you've a great time for all your journeys hereon. Also in Odaiba, Aqua city or what's it known as has a children playground and meals court docket on the best floor, plus particular youngsters toilets. Tokyo with 2 Kids for 3 Nights Hi we are coming to Toyko for 3 nights early Sept with our 7 & 8 yr old. We will arrive on a Sunday and leave on the Wednesday. Japan's Most Beautiful Gardens Popular points of interest near Hostel Chapter Two Tokyo embody Hozomon Gate, Chiisanagarasunohonno Museum and World Bags and Luggage Museum. The nearest airport is Tokyo Haneda International Airport, 17 km from the accommodation. Well situated in the Taito district of Tokyo, The Barn Tokyo is about 300 metres from Shikian, 300 metres from Calligraphy Museum and 400 metres from Tokugawa Tsunayoshi Mausoleum Imperial Scroll Gate. With a backyard, the 3-star resort has air-conditioned rooms with free WiFi, each with a personal toilet. 客廳設計 is near in style sights like Kanei-ji Temple, Chosho-ji Temple and Kemmyo-in Temple. At The Barn Tokyo all rooms are equipped with bed linen and towels. Crown presents beautiful French delicacies and town views, whereas Grand Kitchen serves worldwide dishes throughout the day. Located right next to the Imperial Palace, the hotel is a 10-minute walk from Ginza shopping area, and a 5-minute prepare journey from Akihabara electrical town. Popular Tsukiji Fish Market could be reached within a 10-minute taxi journey. If you’re a SoCal local, you’re sure to have heard of The Huntington, a library, museum, and sprawling botanical gardens in San Marino. Our favourite gem at the 120-acre property is the Japanese backyard within the grounds. The Mayor of Tokyo and others proposed to ship a second donation of trees. With an endorsement from Tokyo City Council, they increased the number of trees from 2,000 to three,020. The second shipment of cherry trees arrived in Seattle from Yokohama in good well being and was transferred to Washington D.C., in February 1912. Meanwhile, the Consul General of Japan in New York Mr. Mizuno suggested that the timber be introduced in the name of the City of Tokyo. At least one licensed tea instructor is current with a workers of other volunteers, who've studied tea for a couple of years. The tea ceremony they perform has been taught in Japan from era to era by the Urasenke branch of the Sen household. Affect Of Japanese Popular Culture Grows Throughout Us Cities Importantly, this form of culture, as Jayson Makoto Chun further demonstrates, was largely based mostly on the transnational links between Japan and the United States. Chun advances the concept of pop pacific as a space of transnational circulate and cultural development through domesticating American influences and repackaging them for Japanese audiences. In each instances, the American pop practice ultimately became an genuine Japanese expertise readily embraced by Japanese followers. The incontrovertible truth that the annual sales of manga books and magazines reach between thirty-five and forty percent of all publications in Japan shows the extent and range of audiences who relate to those materials. Manga is a strong car of affect in the youth subculture, and serves as significant cultural entertainment. In Tokyo you’ll find multi-story arcades, galleries, cinemas, libraries, shops, and museums dedicated to gaming and your favorite pop art forms. On this 3-week cultural immersion, you’ll comply with both tracks to gain a broad data of all three inventive arts and industries. Payne says he is seen a particular improve in demand for Japanese merchandise lately, due largely to the flexibility for followers to access Japanese media, trends and culture on the Internet. Kelts also sees "lots of room for growth, particularly in related product traces" to popular manga and anime. Citation Styles & Tools Quick MLA, APA, and Chicago style guides for bibliographies; tools for storing and organizing sources. Crunchyroll provides each free and paid videos of anime collection and Japanese and Korean dramas. A discussion forum on video games offered by the Game Preservation Society - a spot to seek and share info on historical video games. A information to principally free on-line resources and software that facilitates Japanese research and study.

420 Cool And Unusual Things To Do In Japan eight Days Get the VIP treatment as you take an journey from Tokyo to Kyoto with your own personal tour information during your eight Day Private Japan Tour. Indulge in scrumptious food, get pleasure from comfy accommodations, and explore one of the best of what Japan has to supply. Discover Japan "It's okay if you probably can't swim" Wearing a buoyant wetsuit and life jacket so you'll have the ability to float on the water without shifting your limbs. The pulling guide will assist babies and these who usually are not good at swimming in order that they'll all the time grab and relaxation. It is a confident service that is targeted on comfort and satisfaction even among many blue cave tours. An experienced information with one group charter shall be happy to respond with care. Our websites, purposes, including cellular purposes, and social media sites embrace links to other web sites whose privateness practices may differ from our practices. Our escorted tours in Japan have an average group measurement of around 8-10 travellers with a maximum group dimension of sixteen. Our popular Cherry Blossom Festival itinerary fills up rapidly and travels with a gaggle measurement of 18. Our Japan holidays generally attract these aged between 30 and 70 with an average of age of around 45-50. Whilst fish is a crucial part of the Japanese food regimen, there's plenty else on the menu. Chicken and beef characteristic prominently, whether or not cooked on a hot plate in a delicious teriyaki sauce or deep fried and accompanying an egg. Just 50 kilometers southwest of Tokyo and simply accessible by rail, the city of Kamakura has a protracted, wealthy history and makes for an excellent day journey for these looking for somewhat slower pace. The park also has many historic temples, most notably Rinnō-ji, a temple based in AD 848, and the spectacular Nikkō Tōshō-gū advanced. Consisting of 22 lavishly adorned buildings relationship from the 17th century, Tōshō-gū was constructed by more than 15,000 craftsmen brought in from throughout Japan. Markets In Japan Located on the southern tip of Hokkaido, Japans northernmost island, Hakodate is a metropolis recognized for its seafood and the spectacular view from Mt Hakodate that's rated as one of the country’s high night views. Over the years I’ve probably eaten my body weight in sushi but despite being brought within the station, served in a plastic tray and eaten on a practice it will have been some of the BEST sushi we have ever had. The tuna was wealthy, the scallop fats and juicy, the ocean urchin creamy and wealthy. The salmon eggs didn’t simply burst their salty goodness as you bit into them they almost exploded in your mouth. The entrance to the market is directly opposite Ueno station so it's really easy to search out. While within the area head all the way down to Ueno Park, there might be always something occurring here and across the edge is the cultural district with a lot of Tokyo’s museums and galleries. Tanga MarketTanga Market is a coated local market road in central Kitakyushu, known as the "Kitchen of Kitakyushu". There are about one hundred twenty retailers selling seafood and prepared foods packed into the comparatively small block that makes up the market, including a handful of restaurants. Nishiki MarketNishiki Market , also referred to as "Kyoto's Kitchen", is a slim 5 block lengthy buying avenue with over four hundred years of historical past lined by more than one hundred shops and eating places in Kyoto. Takayama Morning MarketsHeld every day in two locations within the center of town, Takayama's morning markets are considered one among Japan's three famous morning markets. This region is historically generally recognized as Japan's gateway to Asia and enjoys extensive historical, cultural, and commerce ties with continental Asia, notably South Korea, China, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan. The United States is the region’s second largest export market and a top-ten import market, however Kyushu is becoming increasingly integrated into the East Asian regional financial system. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is partnering with American corporations such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to develop and produce fighter planes and missiles. The Japanese manufacturer started assembling F-35s underneath license at its Komaki South Plant in December 2015, the primary of which was delivered to the Japan Self Defense Force in January 2018. In October 2012, the area hosted Asia’s largest aerospace commerce present, “Japan Aerospace 2012” which featured a total of 665 aerospace-related firms and organizations from over 32 nations. Cultivated since the Edo interval, they're highly prized and have noticeable variations to what you may be used to. One of the best methods to explore Nishiki Ichiba is by taste—and there’s actually loads of alternative to take action. There are some snacks you might recognize, whereas others are slightly extra unusual. Depending on how adventurous you're feeling, there’s enough here for a feast, so you'll have the ability to stroll and snack as you want. The Activity Is Cheap! Leisure Experience Reservation Website I also enjoyed these fabulous issues in my these excursions and all the time spent beautiful time with my buddies. I want I truly have seen this Bucket record earlier than my trip to Japan 5 years in the past. I have had Japanese meals before, however that’s obtained to be carried out in Japan I know. Spend two days in rural Gunma using thrilling rivers and swimming in emerald waters. The canyon climbing and riverside activities listed right here are good for the hot Japanese summer. If your travel coincides with summer time in Japan, there are many season-specific adventures to take pleasure in that don't contain overheating in the sunshine. Kakigori, or Japanese shave ice, is a basic summer treat that all visitors should attempt no much less than as soon as. Another cool possibility is to browse underground shopping malls discovered throughout Japan. Usually linked to train stations, underground purchasing areas are crammed with shops, eating places, and cafes, providing air conditioned-relief and leisure to these passing by. In addition, summer season gross sales are common in Japan, making this a perfect time for locating bargains. One factor to notice is that even though these festivals are extremely popular, first-time visitors could also be stunned by the orderliness and tranquility of the crowds. Many attendants at fireworks festival will be carrying yukata, a summer season kimono. So if robots and scantily clad girls aren’t your factor, or you wish to strive a less well-liked (or much less expensive!) one, we’ve received you lined with descriptions under. Note that many of those eating places or cafes require a reservation. Matsumoto – Also generally identified as the “Crow Castle” for its black colour, this fort is especially beautiful during the cherry blossom season. Kanazawa – situated in the heart of town, this castle is adjoining to the well-known Kenroku-en, considered one of three “perfect gardens” of Japan. The 20 Most Stunning Shrines And Temples In Kyoto Selena Hoy reveals 11 of the most unforgettable holy structures you have to see for your self. MATCHA is an online journal devoted to bringing the rich tradition and historical past of Japan to an international viewers. Finally, pour some water from the ladle into your left hand, rinse out your mouth, and spit the water out beside the fountain. Next, maintain the ladle along with your left hand and pour water over your right hand. After hand-feeding wild deer at the Nara Deer Park, visitors can proceed to the imposing Todaiji Temple. Inside, you’ll see the Daibutsu, which is the biggest bronze Great Buddha statue in Japan. Step over the threshold of a temple or shrine entrance gate is one of the most important rules when visiting a Japanese religious web site. The thresholds are as small as a half-inch or as tall as 8 or 9 inches and all the time make an effort to step over it. Like Fushimi Inari, there’s a tunnel of torii gates, although much smaller in size and number. In the case of Shinto shrines you might also see the character gū (宮) getting used instead, e.g. The shrine is a 5/8 dimension replica of Heiankyo’s central authorities constructing Chodoin within the state it was on the time of its opening by Emperor Kanmu. 30,000 square meter backyard is an “excursion type” backyard that is divided into four gardens. Serving as a spot of worship for commoners over 1,300 years, Fushimi Inari Shrine is the headquarters of inari shrines. Enjoy a stroll via the gently rolling land of the spacious grounds of the shrine. What Shinto Shrines do share, in contrast to Buddhist temples, are the instantly recognizable torii gates. 20 Greatest Japanese Museums, Exhibitions & Galleries In The Usa From this basis, the Freer Gallery’s assortment has grown in dimension and scope to incorporate calligraphy, lacquer, prints, and printed books. Japanese artwork within the Sackler Gallery has targeted on graphic arts, ceramics, lacquers, and images, including modern and up to date works. In complete, the Freer and Sackler’s Japanese artwork collections comprise more than twelve thousand objects spanning four millennia. Within a 10-minute walk from Roppongi Station sits one of many largest exhibition spaces in Japan. Hakone Glass Forest - is each an outside and indoor museum devoted to Venetian glass. There are galleries exhibiting Venetian glass from the fifteenth to the 18th centuries, old Murano glass, after which on to fashionable glass creations by well-known international artists, including Dale Chihuly. Tokyo National MuseumThe Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park homes probably the greatest and largest collections of national treasures and essential cultural objects in the country. Mori Art MuseumLocated excessive up on one of the prime flooring of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, the Mori Art Museum hosts fascinating, rotating exhibitions of contemporary artwork. The exhibitions properly complement the nice aerial views that might be seen from the observatory positioned on the floor beneath. The park, which is Japan’s first outdoor artwork museum, was opened in 1969 with the aim of constructing sculpture art extra popular. Approximately one hundred twenty sculptural masterpieces are on permanent display throughout the huge sculpture park. Calmly walking amongst nature whereas enjoying well-known sculptures up-close is an actual thrill that is unique to the outside art museum. There are also play sculptures that youngsters can touch and have enjoyable with, and other options that the entire family can get pleasure from, such as the maze. One of the biggest artwork galleries in the entire world, the National museum boasts over a hundred,000 pieces including 89 Japanese nationwide treasures. C) Other SitesEven websites and not utilizing a sizable variety of images could be of use for obtaining information quickly on the content and history of the gathering. Most websites for institutions with an Asian assortment include a page on its particular strengths, significant donors and essential dates (usually to be found beneath the 'Collections' option). Many embody just a handful of photographs to be able to give a 'taster' to the non-specialist; Japanese sites often embody their best/most famous works. It was finally released online in spring 2003, shortly after Mary Parent died in January 2003, in her eighties. There is a keyword search or a class search, which has plenty of standards, together with artist, medium, country/period, and donor. Museums will likely proceed to mobilize digital and remote technology even after the COVID-19 crisis has subsided. But the pandemic can also reawaken people’s appreciation of the kind of direct, stay experience that only a museum can supply. 10 Guidelines You Have To Know In Japanese Restaurants Its extremely creamy texture and the sourness of cherry tomatoes make an ideal combination! The simplicity of this dish brings out the brilliant factor about the elements. Follow us on social media to add much more wonder to your day. There are correct ways of having fun with your ramen, and special ramen such as the Tsukemen Ramen. They are candy fish-shaped desserts crammed with creamy purple bean paste or the extra acquainted filling of Nutella and banana. [newline]No longer just a lowly service street off the 405, Sawtelle is probably considered one of the finest streets for consuming in Los Angeles. Where To Eat At Grand Central Market Figuring out what to eat at Grand Central Market could be overwhelming, but this information will assist you to narrow things down. One of Japan’s most popular oddities is its famed themed cafés. Allow your self to be charmed by Japan and its classically weird culture with these 10 themed cafés. During the summer downtown department stores have “Beer Gardens” the place you'll be able to sit on the roof, get pleasure from beer and get something to eat. These are all you probably can drink so please watch out and don't drink too much. The finest way to discover a good restaurant is to ask your ryokan innkeeper, but please make sure they know the value range you are in search of and the sort of meals. The innkeeper lives in the neighborhood and is conscious of what is good and what's not. Many major cities have a “Chinatown” where you can get some genuine Chinese meals. Everyone coming to Japan wants to have a style of the well-known Japanese delicacies or try one of the quite a few attractive restaurants. When you first begin your go to to Japan, it might be onerous to pick a good restaurant. There are tons of of kinds of restaurants; to assist we now have introduced a variety of the totally different restaurants that you will discover in Japan. Ryokans are one of the simplest ways to expertise Japanese tradition and enjoy the true comforts of Japanese hospitality and service. MOS Burger – a fast-food restaurant chain (fast-casual) that originated in Japan, it is now the second-largest fast-food franchise in Japan after McDonald's Japan. These restaurants are not as frequent as the opposite varieties listed above, but can typically be discovered on the restaurant floors of larger department shops. Kare-ya are restaurants focusing on Japanese-style curry rice dishes. There is often a minimum of one kare-ya and one ramen-ya inside or around main railway stations. 20 Typical Japanese Souvenirs To Buy In Japan Ceramic bowls are a few of the most popular souvenirs to get from Japan. Mainly because they are all so fantastically designed in addition to being practical for everyday use. It is a sensible Japanese memento you should buy and you will completely adore it. While traditionally they're used to help sign your name onto official paperwork, these name stamps have become quite in style in Japan as people buy these things as presents. After all, Japan is known for some really prime quality as properly as very creative pieces of pens and paper. I bought my fan for around $90 USD dollars, but they'd some fans that went up to the tons of of dollars. A true crossroad of the world, and a land proud of its culture and heritage, Japan is filled with elegant and unique souvenirs for travellers to go house with. [newline]After all, these socks are bought all over the place and for a extremely cheap worth too. You’ll discover all kinds of choices to choose from with all types of designs. If you are desirous to bring home some games or toys, then bringing a Kendama would possibly just be the thing you want. It is a conventional Japanese toy that has been around for ages. It is just like a yo-yo but is also tougher and fun to play with. All around the country you'll find drug shops and beauty boutiques that’ll sell all kinds of cosmetics you can think of. The purchases above have been collected over a number of journeys to Japan they usually've made a fantastic addition to our kitchen. There are stores in Japan the place you'll find all sorts of wonderful snacks and goodies. 月子中心 don't have any specific store in thoughts but thought I'd share some more sweet finds that make good items as nicely. If you read my Tokyo meals guide, you may additionally discover that Bic Camera can also be the place to buy your Tokyo Metro and Toei day passes. Daifuku – These are principally mochi balls with fillings inside. There are so many various varieties here, it's truly onerous to choose but for this trip we thought we'd strive the royal milk tea with chocolate. If you do not buy any, a minimum of you'll get a good chuckle out of some genius inventions you would like that they had back home. 10 Best Onsen Hot Springs Round Tokyo Seven explanation why you must head to Kusatsu on your onsen experience in Japan. The credit card provides that seem on the internet site are from bank card companies from which ThePointsGuy.com receives compensation. This compensation might impression how and where merchandise seem on this site . This website doesn't include all credit card firms or all obtainable bank card presents. Many of the bank card presents that appear on the web site are from bank card companies from which ThePointsGuy.com receives compensation. Most onsens have their own inns and B&Bs to host guests in these remote areas. These inns have been passed by way of the family for tons of of years, and every onsen has its personal story and mythology about the method it was found and the way it’s blessed by friendly gods. Located in japanese Kyushu, Beppu is one of Japan’s most well-known scorching spring locations, with onsen that both soothe or titillate. The so-called Hells of Beppu are a group of blood-red pools, ponds with eerie mud bubbles, boiling blue lagoons, and waters where crocodiles now live — all meant for viewing, not bathing. If you got here to Beppu solely to loosen up, skip the Hells and head straight for the spa and open-air baths at Suginoi Hotel. There’s also the Ebisu Ryokan, which has common scorching baths, milky sulfurous baths, and the “bedrock tub,” a Japanese-style rock sauna. Amongst the various attractions, Japan’s onsens , that are pure hot baths that assist to cleanse one’s system, are excessive on the to-do listing of many visitors. The Japanese word for a scorching spring is onsen, and there are greater than 3000 of them in the country, more than anyplace else on earth – it’s like Iceland on steroids. In Japan, it is not an unusual or even decadent method to move time soaking in a bathtub of effervescent hot water. Here are some which are thought-about to be the holy grail of the onsen world. Now, we all know that sizzling tubs aren’t the identical as natural conventional scorching springs, however there are nonetheless instances when it could really feel like a gift from the gods. Soothing hot water soaks with therapeutic massaging jets will loosen up the physique and soothe muscle aches. You can also get a massage in one of the adjoining massage rooms. With over 750,000 readers every month, Tokyo Cheapo is the location of alternative for worth hunters who need their yen to go further in Tokyo. We cover all of the basics together with issues to do in Tokyo, how to get from Narita airport to Tokyo, which JR rail move to decide on, getting a SIM card and pocket wifi.

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basicsofislam · 5 years

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ISLAM 101: The Basic Concepts of Islam: Part 5

The Concept of Morality

The concept of morality in Islam centers around certain basic beliefs and principles. Among these are the followings: (1) God is the Creator and Source of all goodness, truth, and beauty. (2) Man is a responsible, dignified, and honorable agent of his Creator. (3) God has put everything in the heavens and the earth in the service of mankind. (4) By His Mercy and Wisdom, God does not expect the impossible from man or hold him accountable for anything beyond his power. Nor does God forbid man to enjoy the good things of life. (5) Moderation, practicality, and balance are the guarantees of high integrity and sound morality. (6) All things are permissible in principle except what is singled out as forbidden, which must be avoided. (7) Mans ultimate responsibility is to God and his highest goal is the pleasure of his Creator. The dimensions of morality in Islam are numerous, far-reaching and comprehensive. The Islamic morals deal with the relationship between man and God, man and his fellow men, man and the other elements and creatures of the universe, man and his innermost self. The Muslim has to guard his external behavior and his manifest deeds, his words and his thoughts, his feelings and intentions. In a general sense, his role is to champion what is right and fight what is wrong, seek what is true and abandon what is false, cherish what is beautiful and wholesome and avoid what is indecent. Truth and virtue are his goals. Humbleness and simplicity, courtesy and compassion, are his second nature. To him, arrogance and vanity, harshness and indifference, are distasteful, offensive and displeasing to God. More specifically, the Muslims relationship with God is one of love and obedience, complete trust and thoughtfulness, peace and appreciation, steadfastness and active service. This high – level morality will, undoubtedly, nourish and reinforce morality at the human level. For in his relationship with his fellow men, the Muslim must show kindness to the kin and concern for the neighbor, respect for the elderly and compassion for the young, care for the sick and support for the needy, sympathy for the grieved and cheer for the depressed, joy with the blessed and patience with the misguided, tolerance toward the ignorant and forgiveness of the helpless, disapproval of the wrong and rise above the trivial. Moreover, he must respect the legitimate rights of others as much he does his own. His mind must be occupied with constructive ideas and serious pursuits; his heart must beat with compassionate feelings and goodwill; his soul must radiate with peace and serenity; his counsel must be sincere and courteous. The Muslims moral obligation is to be a vivid example of honesty and perfection, fulfill his commitments and perform his tasks well, seek knowledge and virtue by all possible means, correct his mistakes and repent his sins, develop a good sense of social consciousness and nourish a feeling of human response, provide for his dependents generously without extravagance and meet their legitimate needs. Nature and the world are the field of exploration and the object of enjoyment for the Muslim. He must utilize their elements and ponder their marvels, read them as signs of Gods greatness and preserve their beauty, explore their wonders and discover their secrets. But whether he uses them for utility or for sheer enjoyment, he must avoid waste and excess. As a responsible agent of God and a conscientious trustee, he must always be mindful of others who share the world with him and who will succeed him in the future. The moral principles of Islam are sometimes stated as positive commitments which must be fulfilled and sometimes as negative prescriptions which must be avoided. Whether they are stated positively or negatively, they are designed to build in the human being a sound mind, a peaceful soul, a strong personality, and a healthy body. There is no doubt that these are necessary requirements of the general welfare and prosperity of mankind. And to help man to satisfy these requirements Islam has, among other things, laid down the following regulations: 1. To bear witness to the Oneness of God and the Messengership of Muhammad in a meaningful committal way; 2. To observe the daily prayers regularly; 3. To pay the religious tax known as alms or the poor-due (zakah); 4. To keep the fast of the Holy Month of Ramadan; 5. To make a pilgrimage to the Holy City of Mecca at least once in his lifetime. The moral and social implications of these regulations will be discussed later in detail. Besides these positive measures, there are others which may be called preventive and precautionary ones. To protect man from insanity and degeneration, from weakness and indulgence, from indecency and temptation, Islam has prohibited certain things pertaining to food, drinking, recreation, and sex. Among these are the following: 1. All kinds of intoxicating wines, liquors, and spirits (Quran, 2:219; 4:43; 5:93-94); 2. The meat and products of swine (pork, bacon, ham, lard), of wild animals that use claws or teeth to kill their victims (tigers, wolves, leopards, etc.), of all birds of prey (hawks, vultures, crows, etc.), of rodents, reptiles, worms and the like, of dead animals and birds that are not slaughtered properly (Quran, 2:172-173; 5:4-6); 3. All forms of gambling and vain sports (Quran, 2:219; 5:93-94); 4. All sexual relations out of wedlock and all manners of talking, walking, looking and dressing in public that may instigate temptation, arouse desire, stir suspicion, or indicate immodesty and indecency (Quran 23:5-7; 24:30-33; 70:29-31). This Act of Prohibition is introduced by God for the spiritual and mental well-being of man as well as for the moral and material benefit of humanity. It is not an arbitrary action or a self-imposed intrusion from God. On the contrary, it is a sign of Gods interest in the welfare of humanity and an indication of His good care for man. When God prohibits certain things, it is not because He wants to deprive man of anything good or useful. It is because He means to protect man and allow him to develop a good sense of discrimination, a refined taste for the better things in life, and continued interest in higher moral values. To achieve this, good care must be taken of man’s spirit and mind, soul and body, conscience and sentiments, health and wealth, physique and morale. Prohibition, therefore, is not deprivation but enrichment, not suppression but discipline; not a limitation but expansion. To show that all prohibitions are acts of mercy and wisdom, two Islamic principles are worth mentioning in this connection. First, extraordinary circumstances, emergencies, necessities, and exigencies allow the Muslim to do what is normally forbidden. As long as these circumstances exist and to the extent that he cannot help the situation, he is not to blame if he fails to observe the moral rules of God (see Quran, 2:173; 5:4). Secondly, God has inscribed for Himself the rule of mercy: any who do evil out of ignorance, but thereafter repent and amend their conduct, will be forgiven; surely God is Merciful and Oft-forgiving (Quran, 6:54). In a remarkable, typical passage, the Quran has laid down the grounds and philosophy of sound moral conduct. The passage may be rendered as follows: O Children of Adam! Wear your beautiful apparel at every time and place of prayer; eat and drink, but waste not by excess, for God loves not the wasters. Say: Who has forbidden the beautiful gifts of God, which He has produced for His servants, and the things, clean and pure (which He has provided) for sustenance? Say: 'They are, in the life of this world, for those who believe, (and) purely for them on the Day of Judgement. thus do We explain the Signs in detail for those who understand, Say: The things that my Lord has indeed forbidden are: shameful deeds, whether open or secret, sins and trespasses against truth or reason; assigning of partners to God – and saying things about God of which you have no knowledge (Quran 7:31-33). The range of morality in Islam is so inclusive and integrative that it combines at once faith in God, religious rites, spiritual observances, social conduct, decision making, intellectual pursuits, habits of consumption, manners of speech, and all other aspects of human life. Because morality is such an integral part of Islam, the moral tone underlies all the passage of the Quran and the moral teachings are repeatedly stressed in various contexts throughout the Holy Book. This makes it difficult to devise any reasonably brief classification of these moral teachings according to their citations in the Quran. Every principle is mentioned many times in various contexts. It appears either as a single significant principle or as an element of a total system of morality, which itself is an element of a complete religious supersystem. In view of this, the following passages must be taken only as representative selections from the Quran, rendered and interpreted by human endeavors which, inevitably, fall short of the perfection of the original and complete version of the Book. Serve God, and join not any partners with Him; and do good; - to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, the needy ones, neighbors who are near, neighbors who are strangers, the companion by your side, the wayfarer (you meet), and what your right hands possess (captives, slaves, animals, birds, etc.): For God loves not the arrogant, the vainglorious; - (Nor) those who are niggardly or enjoin niggardliness on others, or hide the bounties which God has bestowed on them; for We have prepared for those who resist Faith a punishment that steeps them in contempt; (Nor) those who spend of their substance, (out of hypocrisy) just to be seen of men, but have no faith in God and the Last Day. If any take the Evil One for their intimate what a dreadful intimate he is! (4:36-38). Say (O Muhammad): Come, I will rehearse what God has (really) prohibited you from: join not anything as equal with Him; be good to your parents; kill not your children on a plea of want; for We provide sustenance for you and for them; And come not near to the orphans property, except to improve it, until he attains the age of full strength; give measure and weight with full justice; no burden do We place on any soul, but that which it can bear; and whenever you speak, speak justly, even if a near relative is concerned; and fulfill the Covenant of God. Thus does He Command you that you may remember. Verily, this is My Way, leading straight; follow it; follow not (other) paths: They will scatter you about from His Right path. Thus does He command you, that you may be righteous (6:151-153). God commands justice, the doing of good, and kindness to kith and kin, and He forbids all shameful deeds, and injustice and rebellion: He instructs you, that you may receive admonition. Fulfill the Covenant of God when you have entered into it, and break not your oaths after you have confirmed them; indeed you have made God your surety; for God knows all that you do . . . . Whoever works righteousness, man or woman, and has Faith, verily, to him will We give a new Life, a life that is good and pure, and We will bestow on such (workers) their reward according to the best of their actions (16: 90-91, 97). Invite (all) to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching, and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious; for your Lord knows best, who have strayed from His Path, and who are truly guided (16:125). Who is better in speech than one who calls (others) to God, works righteousness, and says: I am one of those who bow in Islam. Nor can Goodness and Evil be equal. Repel (Evil) with what is best. Then the one between whom and you there was hatred will become as it were your friend and intimate! (41:33-34). Whatever is given to you (here) is (only) a convenience of this Life. But that which is with God is better and more lasting. (It is) For those who believe and put their trust in their Lord; those who avoid the greater crimes and shameful deeds, and when they are angry even then forgive; those who hearken to their Lord, and establish regular prayer; who (conduct) their affairs by mutual consultation; who spend out of what We bestow on them for sustenance; and those who, when an oppressive wrong is inflicted on them, (are not cowed but) help and defend themselves. The recompense for an injury is an injury equal to it (in degree), but if a person forgives and makes reconciliation, his reward is due from God, for God loves not those who do wrong. But indeed if any do help and defend themselves after a wrong (done) to them, against such (persons) there is no cause of blame. The blame is only against those who oppress men with wrongdoing and insolently transgress beyond bounds through the land, defying right and justice. For such (oppressors and transgressors) there will be a penalty grievous. But indeed if any show patience and forgive, that would truly be an exercise of courageous will and resolution in the conduct of affairs (42: 36-43). If any do wish for the transitory things (of this Life), We readily grant them such things as We will, to such persons as We will, but in the end, We have provided Hell for them where they will burn, disgraced and rejected. And those who do wish for the (things of) the Hereafter, and strive therefor with all due striving, and have Faith, - they are the ones whose striving is appreciable (by God.). Of the bounties of your Lord, We bestow freely on all these as well as those: the bounties of your Lord are not closed (to anyone). (17:18-20) Take not with God another object of worship: or you (man!) will sit in disgrace and destitution. Your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him and that you be kind to parents. Whether one or both of them attain old age in your life, say not to them a word of contempt, nor repel them, but address them in terms of honor. And out of kindness, lower to them the wing of humility, and say: My Lord! bestow on them Your mercy even as they cherished me in childhood. Your Lord knows best what is in your hearts. If you do deeds of righteousness, verily He is Most Forgiving to those who turn to Him again and again (in true penitence). After render to the kindred their due rights, as (also) to those in want, and to the wayfarer. But squander not (your wealth) in the manner of a spendthrift. Verily spendthrifts are brothers of the Evil Ones; and the Evil One is to his Lord ungrateful. And even if you have to turn away from them (the said people), in pursuit of the Mercy from your Lord which you do expect, yet speak to them words of easy kindness. Make not your hand tied (like a niggard) to your neck, nor stretch it forth to its utmost reach (like an irresponsible squanderer, if you choose either way), you will become blameworthy and destitute (respectively). Verily your Lord does provide sustenance in abundance for whom He pleases, and He provides in a just measure; for He does know and regard all His servants. Kill not your children for fear of want. We shall provide sustenance for them as well as for you, verily the killing of them is a great sin. Nor come near to adultery; for it is a shameful deed and an evil, opening the road (to other evils). Nor take life – which God has made sacred – except for just cause. And if anyone is slain wrongfully, We have given his heir authority (to demand equal punishment or to forgive). But let him not exceed bounds in the matter of taking a life; for he is helped (by the Law). Come not near to the orphan's property except to improve it, until he attains the age of full strength; and fulfill (every) engagement: for (every) engagement will be enquired into (on the Day of Reckoning). Give full measure when you measure and weigh with a balance that is straight. That is the most fitting and the most advantageous in the final determination. And pursue not that of which you have no knowledge (idle and useless curiosity); for every act of hearing, or of seeing or of (feeling in) the heart will be enquired into (on the Day of Reckoning). Nor walk on the earth with arrogance; for you cannot rend the earth asunder, nor reach the mountains in height. Of all such things, evil is hateful in the sight of your Lord. These are among the (precepts of) wisdom, which your Lord has revealed to you. Take note, with God, another object of worship, lest you should be thrown into Hell, blameworthy and rejected (17:22-39). We bestowed wisdom on Luqman: Show your gratitude to God. Anywho is grateful does so to the profit of his own soul. But if any is ungrateful, verily God is free of all needs, worthy of all praise ..And We have enjoined on man (to be good) to his parents. In travail upon travail did his mother bear him, and in years twain was his weaning. (hear the command), show gratitude to Me and to your parents. To Me is your final Goal. But if they strive to make you join in worship with Me things of which you have no knowledge (or do any wrong), obey them not; yet bear them company in this life with justice (and consideration), and follow the way of those who turn to Me (in love). In the end, the return of you all is to Me, and I will tell you the truth (and meaning) of all that you did O, my Son! (said Luqman): Establish regular prayer, enjoin what is just (and right) and forbid what is wrong; and bear with patient constancy whatever betide you; for this is firmness (of purpose) in (the conduct of) affairs. And swell not your cheek (for pride) at men, nor walk in insolence through the earth; for God loves not any arrogant boaster. And be moderate in your pace, and lower your voice; for the harshest of sounds, without doubt, is the braying of the ass (31:12-19) O you who believe! Intoxicants and gambling . . . are an abomination, of Satans handiwork. Avoid such (abomination), so that you may prosper. Satans plan is only to excite enmity and hatred between you, with intoxicants and gambling, and hinder you from the remembrance of God and from prayer. Will you not then abstain? (5:90-91). But seek, with that which God has bestowed on you, the Home of the Hereafter. Nor forget your portion in this world. But you do good, as God has been good to you, and seek not mischief in the land; for God Loves not the mischief makers (28:77). These selections can be supported by many others from the Quran and the Traditions of Muhammad. In themselves, they are sufficient to portray the fundamental morals of Islam. These Islamic morals are unique in their nature under all circumstances. They are introduced by God not simply to be admired occasionally but to be enforced and effective. They are meant to help the individual to develop his personality and cultivate his character in the most wholesome manner, to strengthen his bonds and consolidate his association with God, the Source of all Goodness. Never were the Islamic morals designed to intimidate the individual and make him passive or indifferent. One example will illustrate the point. If a Muslim is wronged or oppressed, he has the free choice either to resist and retaliate in an equal measure or to forgive and entrust God with the results of his deed. He knows that he is authorized to take either action, and he equally knows that it is better for him to forgive. So when he forgives, he does so with his own free choice for the love of God. Similarly, when he retaliates he is not violating the Law or acting unjustly; he is defending his rights, an attitude which is a sacred duty in itself, and is helping the rightful authorities to establish order and justice. If Islam were to demand absolute forgiveness as some other creeds do in theory, many undisciplined people would be tempted to do wrong and exceed all limits. Likewise, if Islam were to demand only retaliation, as some other creeds uthlessly teach, there would be no room for mercy and patience nor for spiritual reform and moral maturity, in which case many fine qualities of man would subside and many moral potentials may never be actualized. It is common knowledge that the people who are taught to forgive under all circumstances do not, and probably cannot, practice their teachings, because it is not the interest of humanity in the long run, nor is it in the interest of morality itself. Likewise, the people who are taught to practice stern retaliation have little or no respect for human virtues and care less for moral values as universal rules. But Islam, the Divine foster of human nature, has given the right answer to human problems. To those wrongdoers who are looking for a second chance, who may improve or benefit by granting them pardon, forgiveness is recommended and preferable. But against those who might misunderstand the motives of forgiveness or be tempted to pursue the wrong course, equal retaliation is authorized. Thus, the attitude of the Muslim, in either case, is sound and beneficial. When he forgives, he pleases God, retains the upper hand and contributes to the reformation of the delinquent. And when he retaliates, he defends the right, establishes order and justice, and helps to arrest evil. Now, which is sound morality? The attitude of the person who is a ruthless avenger indiscriminately? Or the attitude of a Muslim who makes room for mercy and forgiveness, and who allows for extraordinary circumstances? And who is normally sound? The person who forgives because he knows that he is not allowed to retaliate? Or a Muslim who forgives while he is fully aware that he can lawfully retaliate? Which is real forgiveness? The one resulting from external compulsion and prohibition not to act otherwise? Or the one resulting from freedom of choice and freedom of action? It is no wonder that the moral principles of Islam are sound, unique, and adaptive. They are the instructions of God, the Source of all goodness and morality.

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pinelife3 · 5 years

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Mindhunter: No Magic

I’ve been reading the book Mindhunter. You might have seen the Netflix/David Fincher TV show (or read the book?) - it’s based on the life of FBI agent John Douglas, the guy who pioneered criminal profiling, especially of serial killers, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. An interesting element of Mindhunter is how many cases Douglas worked on where the police consulted a medium. I kid you not! In tough, high-profile cases where the local police needed a breakthrough, they would sometimes call a psychic to ask for confirmation on their leads, hoping that the medium could magically intuit something about the case that the cops had missed (where does the killer live, what does he look like, what’s his line of work, etc.). It doesn’t sound like Douglas himself ever called a medium, or put much faith in their psychic intuition, but he does mention that they were around and contributing to cases he worked on. It seems like in the early days of profiling, people had a similar opinion of Douglas’ work: that it was superstitious, unscientific, unreliable - this even extended to his testimony and analysis as an FBI expert sometimes being inadmissible in court:

Though I’d already been qualified as a crime-scene analysis expert in several states, the defense referred to me as a “voodoo man” for the way I came up with my interpretations, and the judge ultimately ruled that I wouldn’t testify.

In “Killing Types”, a post on this blog from January 2016, I compared two accounts of how the criminal psychological profile of the Butcher Baker was developed. One account was from Wikipedia, and the other was Douglas, who personally developed the profile:

The serial killer in question was Robert Hansen AKA the Butcher Baker (everything I’m gonna write about him is via Wikipedia. You should just read their article if you want a more detailed account as I’m just summarising here). He was a very shy, skinny young boy with acne and a stutter. He was horribly bullied and the cute girls in school didn’t like him. Wikipedia doesn’t have a citation for this, but apparently: because he was “shunned by the attractive girls in school, he grew up hating them and nursing fantasies of cruel revenge.” As he grew up, Hansen became an adept hunter. Like many serial killers, Hansen was also a thief and an arsonist. From 1971 to 1983 he murdered at least 17 women ranging in ages from 16 to 41.

Hansen’s typical move was to abduct women (usually sex workers) and take them to his cabin near Anchorage, Alaska. There he would rape them and then set them loose so he could hunt them in the woods. Of his confessed murders, many of the bodies have not been found.

By 1982, three bodies had been found in shallow graves in the woods and the Alaska state troopers called in the FBI to assist in putting together a criminal profile. According to Wikipedia, FBI agents put together a profile for a person with the following characteristics:

Experienced hunter

Low self-esteem

History of being rejected by women

Would keep ‘souvenirs’ from his murders

A stutter

...[Douglas] devotes a chapter to Hansen, and the way he describes what happened is actually kind of different from Wikipedia’s version of events. Wikipedia makes it sound like the FBI turned up and pulled the profile out of thin air just based on looking at the crimes, whereas Douglas says that when he and his boys rolled into Anchorage, Hansen was already a suspect. So what they were doing was comparing what they knew about Hansen to what they knew about the crimes and seeing how things matched up and if he was a likely suspect. So the profile they put together did include the bullet points above and, yes, some of that would have been speculation (such as the self-esteem problems, the history of rejection, and the souvenir keeping), but the rest (such as saying he had a stutter) were based on the fact that they knew Hansen and it was completely fucking obvious he had a stutter and acne scarring. Anyway, Douglas describes his profile and process as follows:

“[Hansen] was short and slight, heavily pockmarked, and spoke with a severe stutter. I surmised he had had severe skin problems as a teenager and, between that and the speech impediment, was probably teased or shunned by his peers, particularly girls. So his self-esteem would have been low… And, psychologically speaking, abusing prostitutes is a pretty standard way of getting back at women in general.

“I also made much of the fact that Hansen was known as a proficient hunter… I don’t mean to imply that most hunters are inadequate types, but in my experience, if you have an inadequate type to being with, one of the ways he might try to compensate is by hunting or playing around with guns or knives… I was betting that Hansen’s speech problem disappeared when he felt most dominant and in control.”

So I think we can call that another case closed: it is not possible for an FBI profiler, no matter how gifted, to look at a crime scene or a string of murders and miraculously determine that the killer has a speech impediment.

As you saw above, my read of the passage from Mindhunter was that Hansen was a top suspect, that Douglas made some additional speculations about Hansen, but essentially just endorsed the guy the local cops already suspected. So specific details in the profile that seem like magical inferences weren’t as magical as Wikipedia made them seem. In January 2016 I hadn’t read Mindhunter, but I looked up what I thought was the relevant section on Google Books and that was the basis for the above section of my blog post. (If you’ve never tried to read things online for free, you may not be aware of this, but Google Books provides previews of lots of books, but you have to buy the book to read the whole thing - so back in 2016, I just looked at the pages of Mindhunter that Google had made available for free.)

Now I’m finally reading Mindhunter in full, my take on the process of profiling has changed: I do believe that Douglas and co. could have inferred that the killer had a stutter or bad skin without knowing Hansen (a man with a stutter and bad skin) was the top suspect. Indeed, Douglas tells a number of stories where he and his team correctly made similar inferences - for example, in the profile they wrote up on the Trailside Killer (not covered by Wikipedia but chronicled elsewhere). On the process of developing the profile of Hansen, Douglas writes:

We didn’t profile Hansen or devise a strategy to identify and catch him according to our usual procedure. In September 1983, by the time my unit was called in, Alaska state troopers had already identified Hansen as a murder suspect. But they weren’t sure of the extent of his crimes, or whether such an unlikely individual, a family man and pillar of the community, was capable of the terrible things of which he was being accused...

Even though the police had a suspect before I heard about him, I wanted to make sure my judgement wouldn’t be clouded by the investigative work already done. So before I let them give me the specifics of their man during our first phone conference, I said, “First tell me about the crimes and let me tell you about the guy.”

They described the unsolved murders and the details of the young woman’s story. I described a scenario and an individual that they said sounded very much like their suspect, down to the stuttering...

In a sense, this was the opposite of what we normally do in that we were working from a known subject, trying to determine whether his background, personality and behaviour fit a set of crimes.

Is he a wizard? How’d he do that? How could Douglas know from the description of the crimes that Robert Hansen had a stutter?

The truth is common, ordinary, sensible: he had seen, heard about and worked on cases like this many times and had developed an impression of the kind of person who is capable of hunting women like animals in the woods. He’d spoken to serial killers in prison about their crimes, observed them up close, understood their motivations (control, domination, power, punishment, lust, rage). He’s a walking database of crimes and correlations, which allows him to mentally compile the information he’s received, query it against similar cases and then make what seem like totally uncanny inferences. In terms of demystifying something that seemed arcane and inexplicable, I don’t think I’ve ever read a book as satisfying and steady as Mindhunter. This guy isn’t magical - he’s just fucking sick at his job. He knows his shit. He’s a towering obelisk of professional competence.

That’s not to say they got everything right. For example, Douglas and his unit saw a big difference in lust killers who raped their victims vs. killers who masturbated at the scene. If a killer doesn’t rape his victim but masturbates over her, Douglas and co. would infer that the killer lacks confidence, that he’s inexperienced with women, he’s single, anti-social, probably has a shitty job or no job at all, and because of that he likely lives at home or with a relative, he feels he lacks control, etc. This type of analysis was often correct, but did sometimes lead them down the wrong path (which Douglas acknowledges in the updated foreword for the 2017 reprint of Mindhunter). Since the publication of Mindhunter in the 90s, a number of prominent non-rape lust killers have been caught and it turns out they were married with kids, they were upstanding members of their community, they were homeowners who worked decent jobs, and they seemed normal around women in social settings (see: the BTK Strangler). They simply weren’t the conspicuous, twitching deviants Douglas and his unit imagined.

Mindhunter feels like a book from a different time. Douglas is vociferously pro-death penalty. He’s more sympathetic and vengeful when the victim was a cute lil blondie than a street worn whore. He is interested in the psychology of killers, but is unmoved by their troubled backgrounds: Douglas acknowledges that practically every serial killer he studied had abusive parents, never felt loved or safe, were victims themselves in many ways - but he’s pretty indifferent towards that angle. This perspective would probably get more play in a book on criminals written today - modern writers might be interested in a holistic view of criminality and suffering as cyclical. Douglas does say the number one thing we could do to prevent the development of serial killers and psychos is love our children more and have more resources available to intervene when kids seemed to be headed down the path of darkness... but, look at Douglas’ description of a guy they were looking for in Illinois:

Like so many of these guys, this one is a real loser with a poor self-image. He may come across as confident, but deep-down, he is extremely inadequate.

The UNSUB is a real loser!

One of the key sources of information for Douglas is the killer’s signature. A signature differs from a modus operandi (MO) in that the MO is how the crime is carried out (e.g. killer surveils house for weeks in advance, cuts phone line during the night, breaks in via a window, uses the victim’s tights as a ligature, etc.) while the signature is what the killer does to get off: posing the body, keeping trophies, torturing the victim, taking photographs. Douglas says a killer’s MO may change over time based on failed crimes, stressors, changes to police work, etc. but a signature will remain steady. For example, when Bundy was at his most desperate after escaping from prison (for the second time!), he went on a poorly planned spree. By now, Bundy knew it was all over. The police knew who he was, what he’d done, and were searching for him - it was a matter of time until he was recaptured. The electric chair was waiting. Bundy’s MO had developed with experience and he was typically an organised killer who used a kit, props, and had the skill to lure his victims, but when he knew the net was closing in, he became disorganised - his MO changed. Instead of approaching a pretty girl on the street, luring her to his car and then taking his time to torture/kill her, he broke into a sorority house in the middle of the night and attacked the residents in their own rooms in vicious, quick attacks. Interestingly, this methodology was similar to his original technique when he was younger and less experienced. When he was under pressure, he regressed. Via Wikipedia:

Bundy's modus operandi evolved in organization and sophistication over time, as is typical of serial murderers, according to FBI experts. Early on, it consisted of forcible late-night entry followed by a violent attack with a blunt weapon on a sleeping victim. Some victims were sexually assaulted with inert objects; all except Healy were left as they lay, unconscious or dead. As his methodology evolved Bundy became progressively more organized in his choice of victims and crime scenes. He would employ various ruses designed to lure his victim to the vicinity of his vehicle where he had pre-positioned a weapon, usually a crowbar. In many cases he wore a plaster cast on one leg or a sling on one arm, and sometimes hobbled on crutches, then requested assistance in carrying something to his vehicle. Bundy was regarded as handsome and charismatic by many of his victims, traits he exploited to win their confidence.

For Douglas, an MO is not a reliable way of tying crimes together - because an MO can change. But a signature (which is often at the crux of why the crime was committed) will remain relatively static and is a good clue that two crimes carried out in different ways may be related. The MO may tell you some practical details about the killer (he owns or has access to a car, he’s a local who’s familiar with the back roads, he was known the victim because he was able to gain access to the home without a struggle, etc.) but the signature is driven by behaviour - and that’s what reveals the pits inside a person.

What’s been revelatory for me in Mindhunter is how there is a real, meaningful link between private behaviour and the surface-level details a person. We like to think that our interiority is private and inscrutable to others, that we’re boxed canyon mysteries with rich inner lives and motivations that are inconceivable to the people around us, that our true selves transcend superficial things like how we look or where we work - but Douglas can tell whether a guy will get a haircut after he’s killed someone. He knows if the killer was drunk at the time of the crime. He can tell if they were in the military or not - and if they were, whether they had a dishonourable discharge. How old the killer is. His race. Whether he’ll want to talk to people about the crime. The chances of him owning a German Shepherd. Whether he finished high school. If he keeps a journal. Whether he’s ever been married - and if it was a happy marriage. Most of these are visible details of ourselves that we display to the world, and feel safe displaying because they don’t give too much away: you don’t think people can accurately read anything serious or private about you based on something like how old your car is or whether you watch the nightly news. But all these insignificant details do reveal something. Maybe it is kind of magical.

#Trailside Killer #david carpenter #robert hansen #Butcher Baker #John Douglas #Mindhunter #David Fincher #FBI #Ted Bundy

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mynameisdreartblog · 5 years

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Teachers

Aries: Football (unamerican) coach. I feel as though Betty Crocker's employees have been studying my movements in anticipation for something. Everyone I meet I assume is working for her, and that's not my paranoia acting up. Recently, factory locations have been springing up all over this country, and here I was thinking the hag would just stay in America where she belonged, but no. I was struck terrifyingly curious about this, so I looked on her website <excusing the modem's start-up process>, and look! It says here that she, herself, has ninety-plus different reasons as to why we still love chicken breasts. God, there's no way a human could write that much about chicken breasts; I'm terrified of each and every one of them if I'm quaint. This is a disturbing sight, but I'll abstain from doing something now until it really starts to become a problem… I fear I'm falling into old pits though. […] I hopped on the 'net today and I saw something only describable as vile. Fuck Betty Crocker and her offensive Kiss Me, I'm Irish cookies. Crocker, you liar and probably not even human; you are neither Irish nor worthy of a kiss. She's done it now, she's cross the line and struck me straight in the soul with everything she has: This witch wanted to infest my land with her polluted factories, steal my press with her spam articles, and now steal my culture too! [,,,] I know what I must do now; can anyone drive me to their headquarters? The new one they just built here, the one that's already polluting our water supply with chicken broth. God, I'm so furious, so vengeful, and so willing to vanquish this evil that I! That I… that. Wait, what do you mean we can't use Betty Crocker for this one? Some other epic internet-based literature uses this as a canonical joke? For fuck's sake, just use the Quaker Oats dude instead; we'll take the words we had already and change them to be about Quaker Oats and his offense towards Irish people. <Redmond starts to drive 'til their ride runs out of gas halfway through> For fuck's sake! GIVE ME THE QUAKER OATS MAN, I'M BEING PAID BY THE HOUR HERE!

Gemini: Sociology teacher. I can feel James Rolfe writing a letter that details all the offense that I caused him right now, and I'll be sure to refute his every claim like he refuted all my feedback. Just for reiteration: I will not apologize to him for those honest criticisms I made of his newer video-reviews, specifically of the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. If he's been going at his online profession for ten-plus years now, then he can handle a fair bit of digital criticism. [,,,] I told him that I'd prefer if he'd respect my position more after a paragraph-long explanation as to what my position was. Frankly, I thought Rolfe would be a more understanding and self-aware person to recognize that my life as a national mailperson whose work spans across the entire Indonesian archipelago. Clearly, my goal was that he'd attempt to sympathize with my working-class struggles as he'd do with any American mailman whom he is familiar with, but I didn't get any of the respect I was expecting. Not even I was spared for the decency of verbal abuse, because I was given something worse: The unrelenting silence of zero responses towards my effortful comment. That told me that Rolfe is a man who doesn't care about the issues of working-class folks like me. I'm hesitant to state, and possibly slander Rolfe, for the likelihood that he has a strong prejudice against Indonesian and Papuan peoples by refusing to acknowledge my criticism and my simultaneous first and third-world perspective. […] I just don't know what his issue with me is; after all, I've read every one of his love letters to me and I managed to enjoy them despite how sloppy his nerdy, rage-filled writing was. I think I made out his name the best of all and the thanks he granted me for sending him all of the games nobody else here wanted. «Truce, thanks for supporting my quest to protect the world from shitty-ass games. From: The fucking nerd.»

Scorpio: Public skills teacher. "Mexican-South Korean relations, from Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Mexico-South Korea relations refers to the bilateral relations between Mexico and South Korea. There are an estimated 15,000 Koreans and Mexicans of Korean descent living in Mexico. Both nations are members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, G-20 major economies, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations." [,,,] Yeah, so I pulled out a random book from the library for my book report assignment (I'm still surprised they gave me the freedom to do this), and I got a book about Mexican-Korean relations. I'm also surprised by how they can create such a thick book on a topic with little-to-no history, so I naturally assumed it was some sorta fictionalized history. As you could tell, I opened up the first page to find out that the first quarter of the book was a copy-paste job from the Wikipedia article with most of the citational numbers removed. The font was also in a very large size, presumably to fill space and not be readable for readers with impaired vision. [,,,] I tried opening the pages beyond to the rest of the book's contents, but they seemed glued shut, and the more I attempted to pull them open was I expected them to rip, but they just stayed firm to the bookcase. A closer inspection revealed that it was actually a container welded to the bookcase, and that it there was something inside of it. It wasn't alive, but it could jingle alright. [,,,] I decided to pry that sucker open and I found a mysterious note, but I was scared 'cause it addressed me directly! All it told me was that I should be in bed by 9 pm; I was so scared, but I knew the note told what's best for me, and I obeyed it. The moral of this story is that you should do your homework and follow your bedtime schedule! […] «Dear Dad, stop writing in my diaries, thanks.»

Capricorn: History teacher. You can tell the people who go to this place are from the '70s. After hauling an artificial Christmas tree into a lady's car, she gave me two quarters and said, "it's not much, but get yourself a cold drink." I felt so vintage at that moment: I felt like I was consumed with vintage appeal. My worker overalls were put onto me in that moment and I was ready to work the rest of my life in a windowless retail store. But it was before they sold all of the cool shit they have now like E-cigarettes, so they just sold regular cigarettes to teenagers who had predominant facial hair. […] Right then, wouldn’t anyone be compelled to by the working-class American luxury that is a cold soda: Preferably, whatever they sold at Becker’s? Yeah right, I used to do the same thing everyone else did except I looked aged enough to not even rely on facial hair to get one of those… cold sodas. Isn’t it so vintage that we live in a polity completely built around the idea of infinite room for exploitation resulting from the false belief that there’ll always be new lands to exploit? Isn’t it so vintage that the complete destruction of two entire continents was all done in the name of securing the existing powers in Europe at the height of the 15th century when they were beginning to crumble due to their unsustainability? Isn’t it so vintage that countless cultures, peoples, and languages were… Heh, let’s not let the blade in our mouths become too sharp and let’s get back to that vintage ‘70s lifestyle. Let’s gather me and the boys to stop by Becker’s and get some nice, cold sodas… and be called a savage by the racist clerk who made sure to call the police on me if I ever walked into that place again. Motherfucker should know his goddamn place telling me that I can’t be in the store that he built on land that isn’t his. I was a 27-year-old man and that’s how I was treated… back in sunny Halifax! Ha, I still have the fake pine on all over my hands: My bloody, beaten hands.

#Zodiaccupuncture #Zodipunc #Aries #Gemini #Scorpio #Capricorn

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anonymous-ivplay · 5 years

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Tag Game! (I love these too much whoops)

Rules: Answer 21 questions and then tag 21 people who you want to get to know better. @jattendschaton tagged me so I’m gonna take a leaf from her book and also not tag 21 people lmao

Nickname: Kat! Also Kitty, Kitty Kat, “It’s The Kat!”, and variations thereof. As a toddler my nickname was Tubby because my favorite program was Teletubbies but that uhhhhh didn’t sit well with the grandparents...

Zodiac: Leo

Height: 5′8″

Last movie I saw: Good question....uhhhh,,,,,I think it was Bird Box but that was a couple weeks ago and I can’t remember if I watched something else between then and now

Last thing googled: cpe bach on the true art essay citation

Favorite musician: Lorenzo Ghielmi because he was my organ instructor last semester (!!!!!!)

Song stuck in my head: Whatever the dude in the dorm above me is currently playing on his bass guitar

Other blogs: As of now I don’t have any others (on Tumblr, anyways) but I should probably get a second one for all my reblogs ‘n stuff

Do I get asks: like 5 total plz send moar tho

Following: 54

Amount of sleep: I used to have a wacky sleep schedule but this year one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to get about 6-8 hours of sleep a night. So far it’s been working out alright!

Lucky number: 9, 11, and 56

What I’m Wearing: Pink shirt with a floral breast pocket, denim jacket, 70s flare jeans, and like three pairs of socks and thermal underwear because it’s like -26 out

Dream Job: Baroque opera singer, organist and writer on the side

Dream Trip: A tour of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Russia

Favorite Food: Persimmons! Their slimy texture is pleasing to me ^.^

Play Any Instruments: Organ, Piano, Clarinet, and I sing Soprano 2!

Languages: English, some Spanish and Italian

Random Fact: I was born with fused inner labia

Describe yourself as aesthetic things: Leather jacket and a crocheted flower crown with large-lense wire-frame glasses. Laptop, textbook, novel, bowl of popcorn, and mug of rooibos tea all balanced on one lap. A giggle and a shiver before tumbling headfirst down a staircase. (I’m crap at writing aesthetic stuff help me)

Tagging: @that-chibi-writer @cigarette-louis @alphakratt and anyone else who wants to join!

#tagged #lilac speaks #let me know if you want me to stop tagging you and I will

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charterhunter529 · 3 years

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Family Sketch

Helen Schatvet Ullmann, CG, FASG [adapted from the author’s article in New England Ancestors 8:3 (Summer 2007):41–42, 45]

Do you have a thick file or a notebook full of information you’d like to write up for your family? Or even boxes and boxes of it? Maybe your data is in Family Tree Maker or some other program. Or maybe you’re just in the beginning stages of your research. In any case, whether you just want to write about your grandparents or compile a whole book, the basic building block is the family sketch, treating a couple and their children in an organized and interesting way. Word processing, extremely flexible, is a wonderful tool for genealogists. Remember the old days when we had to cut and paste and retype, perhaps introducing new errors as we went along? About twenty years ago, NEHGS sponsored a seminar held at the Museum of Science here in Boston. My only memory of the whole day is Alicia Crane Williams saying, ��As soon as you get a little information, put it in Register style. This is part of the research process.” So I went home and on my quaint little Apple IIe began transcribing old family group sheets crammed with information. My descendants might just take them to the dump! What is a family sketch? It’s just a story with a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning is the first paragraph that contains the vital information about the parents — all of it. So, if the reader later wants to check back to see just when your great-grandmother married her second husband, it’s easy to find. The middle is whatever you want, usually a biography in chronological order. It could include funny stories or a serious analysis distinguishing between your grandfather and another fellow who bore the same name. At the end is a list of children with their vital data. You may have mentioned each child as he or she joined the family, married, or died, in the biography above, but it’s still important to have a straightforward list of children at the end. Children for whom there is a lot of information may be continued in their own sketches. You can begin with just shreds of information. I started one sketch with my mother’s memories, her grandparents’ names and the recollection that she would sit on her grandfather’s lap and braid his side whiskers — plus the fact that he was a Congregational minister. Then I listed her mother, her aunt, and her uncles, using “Conversation with . . . ” and her name and relationship in footnotes. On the other hand, I have many folders of notes gleaned in the ’70s and ’80s, b.c. (before computers). It’s fun to open one, outline the family structure, and start adding information almost at random as I go through the file. As I work, I can see where I need to bolster a statement with pertinent analysis or where I could undertake more research. Before starting to write, you might read some sections in Genealogical Writing in the 21st Century,[1] especially the pages that diagram the different elements of the parents’ and children’s paragraphs. There isn’t space here to discuss all the fine points, including numbering systems.[2] Many other matters, such as whether to use abbreviations, are really your own personal preference. Generally the fewer the abbreviations, the smoother the reading. Complete sentences, rather than lots of semicolons, also make reading easier. Now you can just start writing. But here’s a suggestion: if you are going to start from scratch (as opposed to creating a “report” from your genealogy database), go to AmericanAncestors.org. Click on the Publication tab, then on theRegister, and then under Side Links, on “Download a Register Style Template for Microsoft Word.” Then “Download the Template!” If you have Microsoft Word on your computer, a document that can function as a template will open. I won’t repeat all that the template says, but it will help you format your sketch, especially those pesky children who appear in hanging paragraphs. This template contains all the “styles” that we use in the Register, everything from title to footnotes. The word “style” here does not refer to Register “style.” It is a word-processing term that refers to the format of each paragraph. When you open Word, you will be in “normal” style, but this paragraph is being written in “body text indent.” The only difference is that the first line is indented. Hanging paragraphs for children are more complicated. These paragraphs line up roman numerals on a “right tab.” There are even styles for quotations and grandchildren. If you’ve already arranged some material and want to use that template, simply copy your work into the blank template. First select your whole document and make sure it’s in normal style. Go to “Format,” then “Style,” and select “normal.” Delete all tabs and spaces you added to format the children. After pasting your work into the new document, save it under the name you want to use. Then review the text and select the “style” for each paragraph by placing your cursor in the paragraph and choosing the style from the Format menu. There should be a little window on your toolbar that lists the styles and offers a quicker route. You can select many paragraphs at once. (A technical detail: if you want to edit the style in any way, say choosing a different font or left-justified text, go to the Format menu, choose “Style,” and click on “Modify.”) In the Register we generally use “normal” style for the first paragraph where the parents’ vital data appear. Then we switch to “body text indent” for the biography. We introduce the children with a “kid’s intro” style and then choose “kids.” When you use that style, hit tab, then the first Roman numeral and a period, then hit tab again. Both tabs will then appear, and you can start typing the child’s name. Small caps are very elegant here. Notice that we include the surname for each child. Then there’s no doubt about the surname and indexing is easier. If you want to list grandchildren, you’ll find the “grandkids” style works a little differently. No tabs needed. Just type the arabic numeral and a period. Then two hard spaces help the names line up nicely [use Control-Shift-Space]. In the Register we use italics for grandchildren’s names. Even the footnotes and footnote references have their own styles. We encourage you to cite your sources for everything. Footnotes are much handier if your readers will really use them, but endnotes may seem less intimidating. The basics of citation format are not difficult. Look at issues of the Register for examples. A current guide is Evidence!,[3] good to have at hand, but the Register often uses simpler formats. The Chicago Manual of Style is also helpful.[4] It saves time to enter the notes correctly the first time. (By the way, the footnote reference number goes after the punctuation.) A further hint about writing style: try reading your work out loud. Are you using empty phrases you would never use when talking? Can you say something more concisely? Are your sentences really sentences? Passive voice — “The ball was hit by the boy,” rather than “The boy hit the ball” — deadens the tone. And proofread, proofread, proofread. You’ll improve your sketch every time.

All the best Family Sketch Images 38+ collected on this page. Feel free to explore, study and enjoy paintings with PaintingValley.com. As I look toward shifting to a different family line in my own research, I think I’m going to take the time to write a bio sketch for the main ancestor I’ve been researching, George Washington Adams (1845-1938) before I say goodby to him for a little while. I think it should be a fun exercise. 93,432 family sketch stock photos, vectors, and illustrations are available royalty-free. See family sketch stock video clips. Family future plan group of sketch family people walking in the garden building a family sketches of future family design interior family sketch color family and money family with money thinking wall.

Finally, for the “icing on the cake,” dress up your sketch with illustrations! Insert photos, autographs, pictures of houses and gravestones, the ship on which your ancestors crossed the ocean, maps — whatever you can find. Your final product should be elegant and attractive, not just to your children but to their grandchildren and beyond.

Sidebar:

A few little tips

Commas and periods go inside a closing quote; semicolons outside.

Footnote reference numbers come after the punctuation.

Titles of published books should be italicized.

Titles of articles and unpublished materials need quotation marks.

Titles of sources such as land, probate, and vital records do not need italics or quotes unless they are published.

Proofread on another day.

Try reading your prose out loud!

Sidebar 2:

Polishing that database reports

In word processing you can discuss all sorts of nuances of dates, places, and identities wherever they seem to fit. Such additions are not so easy when working with a genealogy database. There are quite a few differences between what we consider Register style and the quasi-Register-style report generated by most genealogy programs. If you are using one of these programs, here are some things to consider.

Once you have generated a report, it will carry its own set of word-processing “styles.” You can just accept them, or eliminate all of them by selecting the whole document and putting it in “normal” style as described above, then copying it into a blank Register template. If you do so, eliminate any sex designations for the children first. (You can easily comment on any unusual name in the text or a footnote.)

Family Sketch Clipart Black And White

You should make some other changes as well. First, consider the order of the information. Do the wife’s name and vital data appear after the husband’s notes, with notes on her following? Move information on the wife into the husband’s paragraph and integrate her notes with his. Next, did you document those notes with citations in parentheses? All citations need to be moved into footnotes (or endnotes if you prefer). Multiple footnotes for the same piece of data should be combined into one note, with semicolons between the different sources. You must also consider the format of names, dates, and places. Small caps are good for names, but your report will probably have a mixture of lower and upper case. Capitalizing names of the parents of husband and wife would be distracting. Place names don’t require a county or state after first use in each sketch, but it’s helpful to the reader to add “County” where appropriate. Postal codes are also distracting. In the Register we spell out the names of months and states in the main text and abbreviate them (except those with five letters or less), with periods, in the children’s paragraph

Family Sketch Picture

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1Michael J. Leclerc and Henry B. Hoff, ed., Genealogical Writing in the 21st Century, 2nd ed. (Boston: NEHGS, 2006). 2See Joan Ferris Curran, Madilyn Coen Crane, and John H. Wray, Numbering Your Genealogy: Basic Systems, Complex Families, and International Kin, National Genealogical Society Special Publication No. 64 (Arlington, Va.: National Genealogical Society, 1999). 3Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1997). The introductory sections of this book are especially valuable. 4The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Cartoon Drawing Of A Family

This book publishes, for the first time in full, the two most revealing of Mark Twain’s private writings. Here he turns his mind to the daily life he shared with his wife Livy, their three daughters, a great many servants, and an imposing array of pets. These first-hand accounts display this gifted and loving family in the period of its flourishing. Mark Twain began to write “A Family Sketch” in response to the early death of his eldest daughter, Susy, but the manuscript grew under his hands to become an exuberant account of the entire household. His record of the childrens’ sayings—“Small Foolishnesses”—is next, followed by the related manuscript “At the Farm.” Also included are selections from Livy’s 1885 diary and an authoritative edition of Susy’s biography of her father, written when she was a teenager. Newly edited from the original manuscripts, this anthology is a unique record of a fascinating family.

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spaghetti-explosion · 3 years

Note

Titus Lucretius Carus (/ˈtaɪtəs luːˈkriːʃəs/ TY-təs loo-KREE-shəs, Latin: [ˈtɪtʊs lʊˈkreːtɪ.ʊs ˈkaːrʊs]; c. 99 – c. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic work about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which usually is translated into English as On the Nature of Things. Lucretius has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system that was formalised in 1836 by C. J. Thomsen. Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certainty is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem was addressed and dedicated.[2] De rerum natura was a considerable influence on the Augustan poets, particularly Virgil (in his Aeneid and Georgics, and to a lesser extent on the Eclogues) and Horace.[3] The work was almost lost during the Middle Ages, but was rediscovered in 1417 in a monastery in Germany[4] by Poggio Bracciolini and it played an important role both in the development of atomism (Lucretius was an important influence on Pierre Gassendi)[5] and the efforts of various figures of the Enlightenment era to construct a new Christian humanism. Lucretius's scientific poem On the Nature of Things (c. 60 BC) has a remarkable description of Brownian motion of dust particles in verses 113–140 from Book II. He uses this as a proof of the existence of atoms.

Life[edit]

And now, good Memmius, receptive ears And keen intelligence detached from cares I pray you bring to true philosophy De rerum natura (tr. Melville) 1.50 If I must speak, my noble Memmius, As nature's majesty now known demands De rerum natura (tr. Melville) 5.6

Virtually nothing is known about the life of Lucretius, and there is insufficient basis for a confident assertion of the dates of Lucretius's birth or death in other sources. Another, yet briefer, note is found in the Chronicon of Donatus's pupil, Jerome. Writing four centuries after Lucretius's death, he enters under the 171st Olympiad: "Titus Lucretius the poet is born."[6] If Jerome is accurate about Lucretius's age (43) when Lucretius died (discussed below), then it may be concluded he was born in 99 or 98 BC.[7][8] Less specific estimates place the birth of Lucretius in the 90s BC and his death in the 50s BC,[9][10] in agreement with the poem's many allusions to the tumultuous state of political affairs in Rome and its civil strife. Lucretius probably was a member of the aristocratic gens Lucretia, and his work shows an intimate knowledge of the luxurious lifestyle in Rome.[11] Lucretius's love of the countryside invites speculation that he inhabited family-owned rural estates, as did many wealthy Roman families, and he certainly was expensively educated with a mastery of Latin, Greek, literature, and philosophy.[11] A brief biographical note is found in Aelius Donatus's Life of Virgil, which seems to be derived from an earlier work by Suetonius.[12] The note reads: "The first years of his life Virgil spent in Cremona until the assumption of his toga virilis on his 17th birthday (when the same two men held the consulate as when he was born), and it so happened that on the very same day Lucretius the poet passed away." However, although Lucretius certainly lived and died around the time that Virgil and Cicero flourished, the information in this particular testimony is internally inconsistent: if Virgil was born in 70 BC, his 17th birthday would be in 53. The two consuls of 70 BC, Pompey and Crassus, stood together as consuls again in 55, not 53. Another yet briefer note is found in the Chronicon of Donatus's pupil, Jerome. Writing four centuries after Lucretius's death, Jerome contends in the aforementioned Chronicon that Lucretius "was driven mad by a love potion, and when, during the intervals of his insanity, he had written a number of books, which were later emended by Cicero, he killed himself by his own hand in the 44th year of his life."[6] The claim that he was driven mad by a love potion, although defended by such scholars as Reale and Catan,[13] is often dismissed as the result of historical confusion,[2] or anti-Epicurean bias.[14] In some accounts the administration of the toxic aphrodisiac is attributed to his wife Lucilia. Regardless, Jerome's image of Lucretius as a lovesick, mad poet continued to have significant influence on modern scholarship until quite recently, although it now is accepted that such a report is inaccurate.[15]

De rerum natura[edit]

Main article: De rerum natura

His poem De rerum natura (usually translated as "On the Nature of Things" or "On the Nature of the Universe") transmits the ideas of Epicureanism, which includes atomism and cosmology. Lucretius was the first writer known to introduce Roman readers to Epicurean philosophy.[16] The poem, written in some 7,400 dactylic hexameters, is divided into six untitled books, and explores Epicurean physics through richly poetic language and metaphors. Lucretius presents the principles of atomism, the nature of the mind and soul, explanations of sensation and thought, the development of the world and its phenomena, and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna, "chance", and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities[17] and the religious explanations of the natural world. Within this work, Lucretius makes reference to the cultural and technological development of humans in his use of available materials, tools, and weapons through prehistory to Lucretius's own time. He specifies the earliest weapons as hands, nails, and teeth. These were followed by stones, branches, and, once humans could kindle and control it, fire. He then refers to "tough iron" and copper in that order, but goes on to say that copper was the primary means of tilling the soil and the basis of weaponry until, "by slow degrees", the iron sword became predominant (it still was in his day) and "the bronze sickle fell into disrepute" as iron ploughs were introduced.[1] He had earlier envisaged a pre-technological, pre-literary kind of human whose life was lived "in the fashion of wild beasts roaming at large".[18] From this beginning, he theorised, there followed the development in turn of crude huts, use and kindling of fire, clothing, language, family, and city-states. He believed that smelting of metal, and perhaps too, the firing of pottery, was discovered by accident: for example, the result of a forest fire. He does specify, however, that the use of copper followed the use of stones and branches and preceded the use of iron.[18] Lucretius seems to equate copper with bronze, an alloy of copper and tin that has much greater resilience than copper; both copper and bronze were superseded by iron during his millennium (1000 BC to 1 BC). He may have considered bronze to be a stronger variety of copper and not necessarily a wholly individual material. Lucretius is believed to be the first to put forward a theory of the successive uses of first wood and stone, then copper and bronze, and finally iron. Although his theory lay dormant for many centuries, it was revived in the nineteenth century and he has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system that was formalised from 1834 by C. J. Thomsen.[19] Reception[edit] In a letter by Cicero to his brother Quintus in February 54 BC, Cicero said: "The poems of Lucretius are as you write: they exhibit many flashes of genius, and yet show great mastership."[20] In the work of another author in late Republican Rome, Virgil writes in the second book of his Georgics, apparently referring to Lucretius,[21] "Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet[a] all fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring Underworld."[22]

Natural philosophy[edit]

An early thinker in what grew to become the study of evolution, Lucretius believed nature experiments endlessly across the aeons, and the organisms that adapt best to their environment have the best chance of surviving. Living organisms survived because of their strength, speed, or intellect. In contrast to modern thought on the subject, he did not believe that new species evolved from previously existing ones and denied that modern animals, which dwell on land, derived from marine ancestors. Lucretius challenged the assumption that humans are necessarily superior to animals, noting that mammalian mothers in the wild recognize and nurture their offspring as do human mothers.[citation needed] Despite his advocacy of empiricism and his many correct conjectures about atomism and the nature of the physical world, Lucretius concludes his first book stressing the absurdity of the (by then well-established) spherical Earth theory.[23] While Epicurus left open the possibility for free will by arguing for the uncertainty of the paths of atoms, Lucretius viewed the soul or mind as emerging from arrangements of distinct particles.[24]

roman tito?

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

Text

Tracking Down DOPE, the First Computer Language for Normal Humans

BASIC holds an important place in computer programming canon. Hugely popular in the 70s and 80s this programming language introduced an entire generation to computing. The reason for its widespread adoption was simple: BASIC wasn't meant for programmers, it was designed for beginners. The language meshed well with the egalitarian worldview of early home computing. If you could type then you could become a computer user, and if you could become a computer user you could become a programmer.

BASIC didn't come from nowhere. Like any language it has a family tree complete with phylums and roots. The descendants of BASIC are fairly easy to spot, Visual BASIC is about as far afield as they get. But it's ancestry is a different story that not many people know about. The language that inspired a generation does, in fact, have a predecessor called the Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment, or DOPE.

That name's probably not familiar, but that shouldn't be a surprise. I ran into it almost by chance. Once I learned of this obscure language I found myself in a pretty deep rabbit hole. At the bottom I became one of the few people to run a DOPE program in nearly 60 years. The language is strange, but undeniably shows the skeleton of BASIC starting to form.

What is DOPE, and where does it fit into the larger story of BASIC?

The history of computing is easy to sum up in terms of problems. In the corporate parlance of IBM the worst of these problems were once called dragons, evocative of monsters that programmers were sent out to slay. In the earliest days of the computer one of the biggest dragons around was accessibility. That is, how to get people using computers in the first place. Early computers were hulking beasts in their own right: huge, expensive, and difficult to use. Most often programmers never even touched computers themselves. Instead they would drop off stacks of punched cards for technicians to carefully feed into well protected machines.

In isolation a computer is a novelty. It can hum, crunch numbers, and heat up a room. You need people to actually make computers useful, the more people the better. The state of the art in the late 50s was progressing at a steady pace, but there just weren't enough people in the game. To make matters worse access to machines formed a tight bottleneck. It was never disputed that computers were going to be the future. How exactly that future would develop was another matter.

Programming languages came into being. FORTRAN, ALGOL, and a handful of ancient dialects have their roots in this period. The whole point in developing FORTRAN was to make computing more accessible to non-computer scientists. The key word here being scientists. If you follow FORTRAN's logic then computers are tools for research, something you tuck away in a lab. And while that's one important application it's a limited one. In the grand scheme of things not that many people are scientists. Luckily for us not everyone was a devotee of FORTRAN's vision of the future.

Enter the dragon slayers of our story: John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Kemeny was the longtime chair of the mathematics department at Dartmouth college, and Kurtz was his colleague and fellow researcher.

During WWII Kemeny was involved in the Manhattan Project as a mathematician. While on the project he worked directly with John von Neumann, one of the key figures in early computing. Kemeny spent a year on the project crunching numbers and running figures. In early 1945 his work was done using cumbersome IBM tabulating machines. By the end of the year the first electronic digital computers became operational, and Kemeny witnessed their impact on the Manhattan Project firsthand. The next year Kemeny wrote his first program.

Thomas Kurtz came to the field only slightly later. In 1951 Kurtz attended one of UCLA's Summer Sessions where he saw a computer running for the first time. At the time he was enrolled in Pricneton's graduate program for mathematics. That demo was enough to interest him. Once he learned to program, computing became an integral part of his career. Both saw for themselves how computers changed their own lives, and they realized the technology wouldn't stop there. Computers would only get better and more widespread, the future was going to be digital.

Surrounded by young and impressionable minds the duo set out a task for themselves: teach every student at Dartmouth how to use a computer. STEM students at the college were already being exposed to computers, at least in a limited sense. But that only accounted for a fraction of the student population.

How can you teach an English student to talk to a computer? Why would an aspiring psychologist care about silicon? Sure, computers were going to change everything for everyone. That's nice to say in a lecture, but how do you introduce students to machines?

This would eventually lead to BASIC. Unlike its contemporaries BASIC was designed for non-scientists, and really for non-programmers. Unnecessary constructs were stripped out, data was simplified, syntax was reduced to the bare minimum. The final language would be a masterpiece of restraint. It's not a language a programmer can love but for the vast majority of the populace it's easy to learn.

Compared to its contemporaries BASIC is simple, almost to a fault. Take FORTRAN as an example. In that language variables need to be declared with specific data types, and variable declarations need to be made in specific locations within a program. BASIC doesn't use explicit types, any variable can hold anything you want. You don't even need to declare a variable, just say "LET A = 1" and you are done. Even BASIC's syntax is a breath of fresh air. The language only uses letters, numbers, and a few mathematical operators. You don't have to deal with line endings or brackets.

The downside is that more powerful features are dropped in favor of simplicity. Objects, abstraction, even the aforementioned variable typing, are all absent. BASIC offers just the necessities.

On campus BASIC was a hit. Teachers integrated the language into classes, and students were happy to adopt it. The transition to home computers was an obvious choice. BASIC became the de facto introduction to the digital realm for millions.

The most authoritative source on BASIC's development is the aptly named "Back to BASIC", co-authored by Kemeny and Kurtz themselves. This is where I first encountered DOPE. Or, rather, where I first saw the language mentioned. During the late 50s and early 60s the duo experimented with how to introduce students to computers, specifically looking for a programming language for the absolute novice. When existing languages proved ill fit for this task they shifted to creating a new programming language.

The Dartmouth math department was armed with an LGP-30 computer, a relatively cheap and underpowered machine. In total it had 30 kilobytes of RAM to work with. That computer would see years of hard use and strange experiments. DOPE was one of those experiments, but details in "Back to BASIC" are slim. In a passage near the beginning of the book Kemeny wrote:

"I had a high school student, Sidney Marshall, who was taking calculus at Dartmouth. I had him experiment with a language called DOPE on that same LGP-30. DOPE was too primitive to be useful, but it was the precursor of BASIC."

DOPE was used on the math department's computer and Kemeny supervised it's creation. As a programmer myself I don't really do mysteries—I much prefer resolutions—and this was a massive mystery to me. I've written a good deal of BASIC, it wasn't my first language but it was a big part of my diet early on. I always assumed it was it's own language isolated from any others, and I think that's an easy mistake to make. BASIC doesn't look like anything but BASIC. It's name doesn't hint at some larger lineage. I was left with a glaring hole in my knowledge, and as I soon realized I wasn't the only one out of the loop.

Image: Marcin Wichary/Wikimedia Commons

Running DOPE

There isn't that much readily accessible information about DOPE. Notably a passage written by Thomas Kurts for the book "History of Programming Languages" has a small chunk of code. It's a handful of lines of DOPE, not enough to understand the language but just enough to confirm it's existence. Scouring through interviews and citations I started to build up a picture. DOPE had been developed in 1962. It was only used for a single term in a single math class. It was a step towards accessible programming but didn't go far enough.

The trail led me to a file folder tucked away in Dartmouth's archive. The manuscript within was simply titled "Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment", filed under a collection of Kurtz's notes. The paper was written in 1962, and for the time gave a radically different approach to programming. It's definitely not BASIC, but it's getting close.

First of all, the DOPE manuscript answered one of my biggest questions: why was there so little information about the language? The name should give a little away, DOPE was an experiment. It was used as a proving ground for ideas Kemeny and Kurtz were brewing. The paper describing DOPE was also never published. Partly, because it wasn't really a formal language description. Instead it was part primer, part lesson plan. Students were being used as guinea pigs on the path to a better programming language.

The next step for me was clear. The DOPE paper laid bare all the details of the language, example problems, logical diagrams, and every idiosyncrasy. Reading it is one thing, but I wanted to understand DOPE, and the only way to understand a language is to use it. The larger issue was that there was no way to run DOPE code that really existed. GNU binutils—the most popular compiler package around—definitely doesn't ship with support for the language, and I wasn't able to track down any of the code for the original implementation. So I set to work reviving the language by building an interpreter. Simply put, an interpreter is a program that can understand and execute source code.

Making my own implementation of DOPE was a way to understand the language on a deeper level, and try to reason out why it failed and what ideas made it into BASIC. That, and preserving a dead programming language sounded like a fun challenge. How hard could it be?

As it turned out, not that hard. Even before I had a running interpreter I was starting to see the connection to BASIC. One of the reasons BASIC became so popular was because it was easy to implement. That was by design. The language was structured to make compilation simple, Dartmouth's BASIC follows very rigid syntax structure. Each line of BASIC starts with a number, then an operation, then arguments. It's simple, easy to parse with a computer, and easy to write for a novice.

Each line of DOPE starts with a line number, then an operation, then arguments. This is where BASIC got its structure. For someone implementing the language that saves a lot of time and code. You just break each line into tokens, the operation is always in the same place, arguments are right after. There is zero ambiguity and zero wiggle room. It's easy to zoom through the process.

The Dartmouth team had similar mileage. According to Kemeny's paper the DOPE compiler could turn code into executables in under a minute. That's slow today, but sounds pretty good for the slow LGP-30. Later this same simplified syntax structure allowed Kemeny and Kurtz to pull some slick tricks with their BASIC implementation. Dartmouth BASIC was compiled, but presented to users as an interactive environment. On the backend BASIC code was compiled on runtime with minimal latency, to students it just looked like the school's computer spoke fluent BASIC.

But there's a hitch, and it's one of the biggest issues with DOPE. BASIC deviates from the rigid format slightly. You can actually write mathematical expressions in BASIC, so "LET A = 1 + 1" is a valid line of code. Under the hood a mathematical expression may be treated as arguments, but to a user you can write math in BASIC the same as you'd jot down an equation.

DOPE doesn't work that way. The language is much more terse, no doubt a result of the limited hardware it was developed on. Let me give you a taste. In DOPE that same BASIC statement, just adding 1 and 1, comes out to "+'1'1'A". That's not very pretty, is it? Superficially, DOPE looks a lot more like assembly language than anything else. Most operations are a single character, each line can only perform a simple operation, argument lists are all of a fixed length. All the usual operations for math, assignment, loops, and printing are present, just in a consolidated form.

The other fun complication is the matter of single quotes. DOPE doesn't separate things with spaces, as near as I can tell this is due to its host hardware. Other languages used on the LGP-30 computer follow the same convention. I think it was just one of those functional restrictions that made life a little harder at Dartmouth. Better hardware was available on campus when BASIC was developed, so it escaped that fate.

Appearances aside, there is something deeper going on with DOPE. Variables are the bread and butter of any programming language, it's where you store and manipulate data. It's also another place where DOPE directly presages BASIC. DOPE has a very special kind of typing system. It's almost implicit, but only slightly.

Every variable is a floating point number, that's a number with a decimal point. Adding a little complication, DOPE has four special variables named E, F, G, and H. These are 16 element arrays, lists that can hold up to 16 numbers. When you work with DOPE you just have to remember that these four variables are different.

There are also no strings in DOPE, you can't store or manipulate words or letters. Nearly every other programming language can handle strings in some way, so this restriction is pretty noticeable. DOPE was only ever meant for mathematical work so lacking strings isn't a total dealbreaker.

There is a little bit of subtlety here that I find intriguing. All variables are stored as floats, so any number you enter is converted. Set a variable to 1 and DOPE turns that into 1.000. When you print a variable DOPE figures out the most reasonable format and displays that. So if the float doesn't have anything past the decimal place it shows up without the decimal. To a more serious programmer this should sound like a nightmare. DOPE takes away any control over data types by just not having data types. Programmers don't like giving up control, this was especially true during the era DOPE was developed.

Image: Marcin Wichary/Wikimedia Commons

This language wasn't meant for programmers. It was meant for english students who didn't know the difference between an integer 1 and a floating point 1. It was designed for political science majors who had never seen a computer before. The bizarre typing system in DOPE meant you could teach programming without teaching about data types. Instead of having to explain the subtle differences between 1.0 and 1 a teacher can just cut to the chase. To the uninitiated these rules don't make that much sense, so just drop them. What you get is a much more gentle introduction to computers.

It may come as a surprise for BASIC users, but early versions of the language had a very similar typing system. In v1 of Dartmouth BASIC every variable was stored as a float, with smart formatting for input and output. Strings came in subsequent versions. But there is a key difference, and it comes in the form of arrays. In BASIC an array is declared using the DIM operation. It tells the computer to make room for a new array, and gives that array a name. In early versions this changed a variable into a 10 element array of numbers. This is one of the areas where BASIC broke from DOPE, and I think in a good way.

DOPE reserved four variables as arrays. That works just fine, but it's clunky. Having to remember which letters are lists and which are numbers is annoying. It adds in a layer of illogical complexity. Why is E an array? Well, it just is. My educated guess is that E, F, G and H were hardcoded as arrays since those are common names for vectors in physics, but that's just a shot in the dark. For a newcomer it's just an arbitrary rule. Kemeny and Kurtz were right to ditch this one.

The last part of DOPE that bears mentioning is also one of the key parts of BASIC: line numbers. Anyone who knows BASIC, or has seen BASIC, will be familiar with this syntax. Each line has a number that doubles as a label and a way to edit your program. With line numbers being explicitly defined a programmer gets to name each part of their code. DOPE also uses line numbers, but in a more limited way. Each line has an implicit number, you start at 1 and go up to 99.

You don't have control over DOPE's line numbers, but each number does have it's own label. These aren't just superficial, line numbers in DOPE are what makes it into a fully fledged programming language. The much-maligned GOTO statement exists in this earlier language, just by another name. GOTO tells BASIC to jump execution to a specific line number. It's a simple way to handle flow control of a program, but there are often better options. Many programmers dislike GOTO for that reason alone, but the statement can also make code hard to read and debug. You can't instantly tell what "GOTO 11" means unless you know what is waiting for you on line 11.

In DOPE the "T" operation lets you jump TO a given line number. Once again, this is the kind of feature programmer's don't really like. GOTO, and by lineage T, has been called a danger to programmers everywhere. It can be unsafe to overuse, if code changes a stray GOTO can jump into the unknown. For large programs jumping by line number gets weird, but that's an issue for programmers.

For the novice jumping by number is simple and understandable. You don't need extra code to add labels. Since most new programmers aren't writing massive and intricate programs a lot of the dangers of GOTO disappear. Conditionals work in a similar way in DOPE, specifying line numbers to jump to dependent on a comparison. Again, in line with early versions of BASIC. And again, kept as simple as possible.

The only outlier here are loops. One of the parts of BASIC that always struck me as strange is how it handles FOR loops. In general loops are how you repeat operations in a program. If you want to do something over and over again you use a loop. BASIC's specific flavor of loop is the FOR loop. As in, do something FOR values of X from 1 to 10.

Most flow control in BASIC is handled using line numbers. Some later versions allow if statements to contain expressions but Dartmouth BASIC only allows for conditional jumps. Loops are different, a FOR loop in BASIC encloses a block of code, ending in a NEXT. Once again this quirk is straight from DOPE, loops enclose a chunk of code to run and rerun until complete.

However, DOPE loops have their downsides. And really, this gets into the problems I ran into with DOPE. Kemeny was right to say the language was too simple, and loops are a perfect example. Really, loops have been something of a thorn in my side during my journey. On the interpreter side that means extra code. Executing code by block instead of line number means loops have to be handled a little differently than anything else in the language. When I was actually able to get DOPE code running loops remained annoying because they only go one way. Loops in DOPE can only increment, and only in steps of 1. Fine. It's a loop. It's the most basic loop possible. It works, but it's very restrictive. Something as simple as a countdown takes a little extra code to achieve.

The total lack of strings also restricts what you can do with DOPE. There are operations to output strings, sort of. One operation lets you print a newline character, and another outputs a string literal. This can be used to format and label your outputs, but without variable strings you can't write very flashy code. I can write the classic "Hello World," but you won't be seeing any games in DOPE. Luckily BASIC would include strings after a fashion.

DOPE's Legacy

What I've found is that DOPE works well for math and not much else. Calculating tables of values is straightforward. Running a loop to figure lists of roots or squares is easy. I've even been able to tackle larger equations in DOPE, so far the most complicated thing I've written is a program that approximates pi. There's a certain zen to converting equations into simple operations, that is if you have some patience. Straying from simple math turns into a struggle. I keep trying to make a number guessing game but running into the wall of random number generation.

This restriction to simple math isn't necessarily a bad thing. The language was developed by mathematicians as a way to introduce complete novices to computing. It's not fully general purpose, true, but that's not important. DOPE isn't the kind of language you could stick with for a career, it was never intended to be. It's just enough to show students what a computer is, what kinds of problems a computer can solve, and how a programmer might solve them.

So why haven't more people heard about DOPE? Is it just a failed language? I don't think so. DOPE has remained hidden because it was successful. The E stands for experiment after all, and after a single class at Dartmouth the experiment had ran its course. The ideas in DOPE worked well enough for Kemeny and Kurtz to continue their line of research. BASIC is the direct result of DOPE's success. The reason BASIC worked so well in classrooms and on early home systems was because it was simple. The language was easy to learn, easy to implement, and easy to understand. DOPE itself didn't last, but the core concept was sound enough to birth BASIC.

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