Notices by Stanislav Panin (spanin@mstdn.social)

The biggest issue that #humanities can and should help to address is the lack of imagination.

For example, in a city designed for cars, people oftentimes have hard time imagining a good public transportation system or pedestrian infrastructure. They feel like it is inevitable to plan cities this way. The same applies to other areas of life.

The biggest promise of history and the study of other cultures is the ability to show that it is possible to live differently.

@SecularJeffrey Nostalgic. I grew up watching (analog) TV using a very basic antenna, which we called "whiskers," but in English it is known as "rabbit ears": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_antenna#Rabbit_ears

#religion #egypt #archaelogy #history https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/12/251228074502.htm

@Hunter It is what the Internet was supposed to be at the first place, isn't it? What's sad is that more and more often people treat instances of such cultural exchange as some kind of miracle rather than a norm.

Some takeaways from 2023 Pew Research Center's survey about digital privacy. 81% of Americans are concerned about how private companies use their data and 71% – about the government. 70% do not trust companies to use AI responsibly. Privacy concerns correlate with education, age, and race/ethnicity but the support for more regulation is bipartisan. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/10/18/views-of-data-privacy-risks-personal-data-and-digital-privacy-laws/

Rice University currently hosts one of the biggest archival collections of all things paranormal called the Archives of the Impossible. A part of this archiving project was to record oral history interviews with the first donors of this archive - Brenda Denzler, Edwin C. May, Jacques Vallee, Richard Haines, and Stanley Krippner. If you have ever been interested in the history of the paranormal, take a look at these interviews, including mine with Richard Haines. https://digitalcollections.rice.edu/archives-of-the-impossible/archives-of-the-impossible-oral-histories