#myths — Public Fediverse posts

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About LANs

https://dreamstation.systems/personal/lanfalsehoods.html

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49581179

#HackerNews #Falsehoods #Programmers #Believe #About #LANs #LANs #Networking #Myths #TechEducation #ProgrammerLife

Wednesday, September 2, 2026

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2026/09/wednesday-september-2-2026/

The Beginnings of Man -Part 1

https://tonyaholisticblog.com/2026/08/31/the-beginnings-of-man-part-1/

'Mercury and Psyche' by Reinhold Begas (1878), and a photo of the artist

#art #arts #artist #artists #museum #museums #myth #myths #mythology #sculpture #sculpting #artlover #artlovers #artgallery #artnet #artwork #artmuseums #artmuseum

https://www.evshift.com/511741/what-battery-myths-have-you-heard-theyre-probably-all-wrong-ev-electricvehicles-battery/ What battery myths have you heard? They’re probably all wrong! #ev #electricvehicles #battery #AreElectricVehiclesExpensive #Battery #ElectricCars #ElectricVehicles #Electricvehicles #EV #Heard #HowDoesEVChargingWork #Myths #Renewables #RunningAnElectricVehicle #Theyre #Wrong

Sometimes you see a #nature photo and you suddenly understand where the #myths came from

#bloomscrolling #flowers #fae #phoenix #mtetna #flowers #volcano #naturalscience #mythology #silentsunday #fairy

Who really built the #EgyptianPyramids and how did they do it? https://zorz.it/satgx

#history #technology #hypotheses #MarkLehner #archaeologist #GreatPyramid #Veritasium #myths #realities

Many, especially Tech Bros™, like to imagine immortality for themselves.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/05/12/never-forever-not-ever/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

As for me, I'm not interested. I wrote about why not.

#philosophy #longevity #health #mentalhealth #forever #finitude #affluence #blog #podcast #myths #universe #physics #metaphysics #vampires #connexion #immortality #metaphors #lakoff #death #writing #perception #life #Tithonus

Europa & Europa

for more on the #moon : https://starrytimepodcast.podbean.com/e/asterism-the-moons-of-jupiter/

for more on the #myth (aka that time #Zeus became a bull and... uh abducted the princess Europa...): https://starrytimepodcast.podbean.com/e/taurus-the-bull/

📷 :https://images.nasa.gov/details/PIA01503 & https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/188530

#NASA #Astrophotography #moon #Europa #Jupiter #MoonsOfJupiter #Science #StarLore #mythology #GreekMythology #myths #Museum #Art #MetMuseum #Sculpture

images of the the Ludovisi Ares, a 2nd Century AD Roman copy of a 4th century BC Greek original

#sculpture #sculptures #sculpting #statue #statues #greek #roman #history #arthistory #myth #myths #mythology #artist #artists #artlover #artlovers #rome #greece #museum #museums #artmuseum #artmuseums

“I felt called to this adventure and really connected to it and really protective of the materials that they gave me and wanting to do right by them.”

#Indigenous #CoastSalish #books #myths #legends #magic

https://www.windspeaker.com/news/windspeaker-news/revealing-old-stories-modern-way-called-multimedia-artist

A quirky guide to myths and lore based in actual science – Ars Technica

G is for geomythology

A quirky guide to myths and lore based in actual science

Folklorist/historian Adrienne Mayor on her new book Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore

By Jennifer Ouellette – Dec 29, 2025 7:30 AM |

Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends. There is a growing body of research that strives to connect those ancient stories with the real natural events that inspired them. Folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor has put together a fascinating short compendium of such insights with Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, from dry quicksand and rains of frogs to burning lakes, paleoburrows, and Scandinavian “endless winters.”

Mayor’s work has long straddled multiple disciplines, but one of her specialities is best described as geomythology, a term coined in 1968 by Indiana University geologist Dorothy Vitaliano, who was interested in classical legends about Atlantis and other civilizations that were lost due to natural disasters. Her interest resulted in Vitaliano’s 1973 book Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins.

Mayor herself became interested in the field when she came across Greek and Roman descriptions of fossils, and that interest expanded over the years to incorporate other examples of “folk science” in cultures around the world. Her books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (2009), as well as Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & the Scorpion Bombs (2022), exploring the origins of biological and chemical warfare. Her 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, explored ancient myths and folklore about creating automation, artificial life, and AI, connecting them to the robots and other ingenious mechanical devices actually designed and built during that era.

When her editor at Princeton University Press approached her about writing a book on geomythology, she opted for an encyclopedia format, which fit perfectly into an existing Princeton series of little encyclopedias about nature. “In this case, I wasn’t going to be working with just Greek and Roman antiquity,” Mayor told Ars. “I had collected very rich files on geomyths around the world. There are even a few modern geomyths in there. You can dip into whatever you’re interested in and skip the rest. Or maybe later you’ll read the ones that didn’t seem like they would be of interest to you but they’re absolutely fascinating.”

Mythopedia is also a true family affair, in that illustrator Michelle Angel is Mayor’s sister. “She does figures and maps for a lot of scholarly books, including mine,” said Mayor. “She’s very talented at making whimsical illustrations that are also very scientifically accurate. She really added information not only to the essays but to the illustrations for Mythopedia.

As she said, Mayor even includes a few modern geomyths in her compendium, as well as imagining in her preface what kind of geomyths might be told thousands of years from today about the origins of climate change for example, or the connection between earthquakes and fracking. “How will people try to explain the perplexing evidence that they’ll find on the planet Earth and maybe on other planets?” she said. “How will those stories be told?”

Ars caught up with Mayor to learn more.

Ars Technica:  Tell us a little about the field of geomythology.

Adrienne Mayor: It’s a relatively new field of study but it took off around 2000. Really, it’s a storytelling that has existed since the first humans started talking to one another and investigating their landscape. I think geomyths are attempts to explain perplexing evidence in nature—on the Earth or in the sky. So geomyth is a bit of a misnomer since it can also cover celestial happenings. But people have been trying to explain bizarre things, or unnatural looking things, or inexplicable things in their landscape and their surroundings since they could first speak.

These kind of stories were probably first told around the first fires that human beings made as soon as they had language. So geomyths are attempts to explain, as I say, but they also contain memories that are preserved in oral traditions. These are cultures that are trying to understand earthshaking events like volcanoes or massive floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, avalanches—things that really change the landscape and have an impact on their culture. Geomyths are often expressed in metaphors and poetic, even supernatural language, and that’s why they’ve been ignored for a long time because people thought they were just storytelling or fiction.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: A quirky guide to myths and lore based in actual science – Ars Technica

Useless Facts, Badly Drawn #478: The Dodo.
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#dodo #commonmisconceptions #misconceptions #myths #birds #extinct #animals #history #pseudohistory #webcomics #comics #uselessfacts #uselessfactsbadlydrawn

Why Real #Biblical #Angels Are Creepy, Beastly, and Hardly #Angelic

https://www.openculture.com/2025/10/why-real-biblical-angels-are-creepy-beastly-and-hardly-angelic.html
https://youtu.be/40KcrrfbJ6o

#mythical #myths #religion #mythic #cults

BUDI95: Are eWallets and mobile apps allowed at petrol stations? Are smartphones a safety risk? #apps #budi95 #caltexgo #cars #digitallife #ewallet #firerisk #mythbuster #myths #news #petrolstation #ron95 #ron95petrol #safety #setel #shellasia #tngewallet #transport

https://soyacincau.com/2025/09/25/budi95-is-it-safe-to-use-mobile-phone-at-petrol-station-fire-risk-myth/

BUDI95: Are eWallets and mobile apps allowed at petrol stations? Are smartphones a safety risk? #apps #budi95 #caltexgo #cars #digitallife #ewallet #firerisk #mythbuster #myths #news #petrolstation #ron95 #ron95petrol #safety #setel #shellasia #tngewallet #transport

https://soyacincau.com/2025/09/25/budi95-is-it-safe-to-use-mobile-phone-at-petrol-station-fire-risk-myth/

Failed #Prophecies: The #Mythic Origins of the #OldTestament #Apocalypse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWD93fGrPVY

Join #DerekLambert as we uncover the mythic origins of #apocalyptic #prophecy, tracing how #ancientHebrew seers borrowed flood #epics, dragon-slaying tales, and cosmic upheaval #myths from Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt—and why their vivid predictions of “the #DayoftheLord” never came to pass.

#Christian #Apologist Folds to Friendly #Skeptic (#FrankTurek response)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6eEUaLGR4I

What happens when a calm, well-informed skeptic challenges a top Christian apologist? We break down the moment Frank Turek gets caught off guard by sharp questions about the #resurrection and #martyrdom... maybe with my Minimal Witnesses hypothesis with an assist?

#atheist #atheism #christianity #myths #god

Archaeologists Reveal The Enigmatic Burial Practices Of The Southern Jê [Present Day Brazil]
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https://phys.org/news/2025-02-archaeologists-reveal-enigmatic-burial-southern.html <-- shared technical article
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101646 <-- shared paper
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#GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #burial #grave #SouthernJe #Brazil #Brasil #archaeology #spatiotemporal #date #dating #chronology #burialcaves #cemetery #Kaingang #Laklãnõ #cosmologies #visibility #lineofsight #BrazilianHighlands #symbology #mound #enclosure #deathscapes #mythology #myths #Ethnographic #ethnography #landscape #landscapearchaeology #indigenous #firstnation #indigenousGIS #knowledgesystems

Archaeologists Reveal The Enigmatic Burial Practices Of The Southern Jê [Present Day Brazil]
--
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-archaeologists-reveal-enigmatic-burial-southern.html <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101646 <-- shared paper
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #burial #grave #SouthernJe #Brazil #Brasil #archaeology #spatiotemporal #date #dating #chronology #burialcaves #cemetery #Kaingang #Laklãnõ #cosmologies #visibility #lineofsight #BrazilianHighlands #symbology #mound #enclosure #deathscapes #mythology #myths #Ethnographic #ethnography #landscape #landscapearchaeology #indigenous #firstnation #indigenousGIS #knowledgesystems

Archaeologists Reveal The Enigmatic Burial Practices Of The Southern Jê [Present Day Brazil]
--
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-archaeologists-reveal-enigmatic-burial-southern.html <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101646 <-- shared paper
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #burial #grave #SouthernJe #Brazil #Brasil #archaeology #spatiotemporal #date #dating #chronology #burialcaves #cemetery #Kaingang #Laklãnõ #cosmologies #visibility #lineofsight #BrazilianHighlands #symbology #mound #enclosure #deathscapes #mythology #myths #Ethnographic #ethnography #landscape #landscapearchaeology #indigenous #firstnation #indigenousGIS #knowledgesystems

Archaeologists Reveal The Enigmatic Burial Practices Of The Southern Jê [Present Day Brazil]
--
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-archaeologists-reveal-enigmatic-burial-southern.html <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101646 <-- shared paper
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #burial #grave #SouthernJe #Brazil #Brasil #archaeology #spatiotemporal #date #dating #chronology #burialcaves #cemetery #Kaingang #Laklãnõ #cosmologies #visibility #lineofsight #BrazilianHighlands #symbology #mound #enclosure #deathscapes #mythology #myths #Ethnographic #ethnography #landscape #landscapearchaeology #indigenous #firstnation #indigenousGIS #knowledgesystems

Archaeologists Reveal The Enigmatic Burial Practices Of The Southern Jê [Present Day Brazil]
--
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-archaeologists-reveal-enigmatic-burial-southern.html <-- shared technical article
--
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101646 <-- shared paper
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #spatialanalysis #burial #grave #SouthernJe #Brazil #Brasil #archaeology #spatiotemporal #date #dating #chronology #burialcaves #cemetery #Kaingang #Laklãnõ #cosmologies #visibility #lineofsight #BrazilianHighlands #symbology #mound #enclosure #deathscapes #mythology #myths #Ethnographic #ethnography #landscape #landscapearchaeology #indigenous #firstnation #indigenousGIS #knowledgesystems

Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho / Ze’ev Herzog for “Ha’aretz”. 1999

 Friday, October 29, 1999

Deconstructing the walls of Jericho
Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the ...

https://differx.noblogs.org/2024/09/03/deconstructing-the-walls-of-jericho-zeev-herzog-for-haaretz-1999/

#kritik #Palestina #ricostruzioni #ZinesAuthors #ActualFindings #ArchaeologicalFindings #archaeology #bible #BronzeAge #Canaan #Egypt #IronAge #Israel #Jericho #Judea #lies #myths #ZeevHerzog #Palestine

The Problem of Defining #God

https://new.exchristian.net/2024/03/the-problem-of-defining-god.html

Is there one God or many? Does He have all the omni traits or is He limited in some ways? Does He care about us, or are we insignificant bugs to Him? How do we know the answers to any of these, and many similar questions? The usual answer is that there is a #holy book, the #Quran, #Bible or #BookofMormon for example, which tells us about this being.

#religion #sundayschool #atheist #christian #muslim #mormon #myths

THEY Rewrote the ENTIRE THING | #BartDEhrman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYDi7pKCtE

#Bible #christianity #apostlePaul #BartEhrman #Myths #mythology #NT #biblical #BibleHistory #scribes #scholar #atheism

#introduction: I'm a storyteller practicing the art of #oralstorytelling

I tell #folktales #myths #legends #FairyTales primarily to live audiences. Currently building a repertoire of traditional tales from the #Uyghur oral tradition.

Also interested in: #theatre #AudioDrama #SocialAudio #baking #movies and using #Instagram for #ConceptualArt

Mastodon seems to encourage puns, absurdist mini-plays, and hilarious intentional misreadings of everything and I am here for it.

Strategy’s Eclipse and the Big Chief

One of the more provocative business articles I’ve read lately appeared just last week, on forbes.com. It’s a piece by Steve Denning about the collapse of the consulting firm Monitor. The article has already generated thousands of comments and what its own author, in a follow-up post, calls a lot of “social media brouhaha”.

Most of the discussion so far focuses on Denning’s analysis of Monitor’s collapse. He traces the firm’s demise to Michael Porter’s flawed idea that “sustainable competitive advantage” could be gained in markets “by studying the numbers and the existing structure of the industry.” Monitor, in Denning’s view, was selling an “illusory product” that merely “supports and advances the pretensions of the C-suite.” Where Monitor’s approach to strategy failed was where it matters now more than ever: helping businesses connect with or “delight” customers, or innovate, or do things that customers (or, for that matter, society as a whole) want them to do.

Not everyone agrees with this analysis, of course, and Denning has been responding to criticism and comment on the Forbes site and on Twitter. I am more intrigued by what Monitor’s downfall might signify – whether it indicates that there are larger changes afoot.

Denning himself wonders if the firm’s collapse marks the end of an “era”. Several of his readers and Tweeters (including me) have suggested that pure strategy plays are simply no longer viable. But that observation only scratches the surface, I think. The downfall of Monitor may indicate something else as well – a larger change in the configuration of CEO or executive power within the enterprise, and the end of a certain idea or iconography of the CEO.

Denning approaches this very thought as he lays out his historical argument, which is basically the story of how Michael Porter got lucky and launched Monitor at precisely the right moment. When Monitor first appeared on the scene in 1979, writes Denning, a new era was dawning:

Pursuit of shareholder value (“the dumbest idea in the world”) was just getting going with a vengeance. The C-suite was starting to realize that they could cash in, big time. Along comes Michael Porter with a rain dance that justifies their cashing in. Porter arrived at just the right time. Hopefully that era is now coming to an end. People are starting to see the rain dance for what it is.

I would hasten to add that the dumbest idea in the world, the doctrine of shareholder value, helped usher in another very bad idea that is still very much with us — the idea of the “CEO” that started to take hold at roughly around the time that acronym first appeared on the scene, in the early 1970s. The CEO is largely an invention of that period.

I’ve taken up this theme in a few posts (here and here and here). A number of journalists and academics have addressed this same point, directly and indirectly. For Rakesh Khurana, the cultish construct of the CEO emerges out of the transition from managerial to investor capitalism. In response to the growing power of institutional investors (like pension funds, bank trusts, insurance firms, endowment funds, and money managers), boards had, by the 1980s, come to focus almost exclusively on the search for an outside celebrity CEO “savior” who would not only appease and appeal to newly-empowered institutional investors but also make a big splash in the newly-emergent American business press.

Needless to say, this further consolidated decision-making power at the top of the corporate hierarchy. At the same time, the newly powerful CEO had become a cultural icon of celebrity and success. We made a totem of corporate executive power.

If the mantra of investor capitalism was “shareholder value,” the central mystery of the new faith was the “agency” problem (as described in a now-canonical 1976 paper by Jensen and Meckling [pdf]). The interests of shareholders and managers were now to be “aligned.” Results have been mixed: a myopia set in, putting the “focus more on the short-term management of the share price,” writes Christopher Bennett on a Conference Board blog post, “and less on the long-term management of the business.”

In a Washington Post Op Ed, Michael Useem (who’s written the book on investor capitalism) takes it one step further. He connects the “unrelenting pressure of the equity market on company leaders to meet quarterly TSR expectations” with the offshoring of operations, “regardless of the impact on the domestic workforce.” Worse, it’s invited leaders to behave like sociopaths, or at least irresponsibly: “an incessant equity-market demand on company leaders to focus on their own advantage whatever the disadvantage for others” has made “fewer executives and directors…able to step forward to advocate what is required for a vibrant economy, not just what is required for their own prosperity.”

Shareholder value may have not have been the dumbest idea ever, as Denning would have it, but it was, at best, a Faustian bargain for American society. It was an important article of faith — and not just for the believers, but for society as a whole, during the period in which the celebrity CEO took on his (yes, usually his) unique features and cast, all the trappings of his office.

Strategy, especially Monitor’s brand of strategy, played a crucial role here. Denning refers us to a passage in Matthew Stewart’s The Management Myth:

Porter’s theory thus played to the image of the CEO as a kind of superior being. As Stewart notes, “For all the strategy pioneers, strategy achieves its most perfect embodiment in the person at the top of management: the CEO. Embedded in strategic planning are the assumptions, first, that strategy is a decision-making sport involving the selection of markets and products; second, that the decisions are responsible for all of the value creation of a firm (or at least the “excess profits,” in Porter’s model); and, third, that the decider is the CEO. Strategy, says Porter, speaking for all the strategists, is thus ‘the ultimate act of choice.’ ‘The chief strategist of an organization has to be the leader— the CEO.”

With the passing of Monitor, this concept of strategy may start to go by the board. And so, with any luck, will the idea of the CEO as the “superdecider” (Denning’s word) or super-anything. The rain dance is over, and we can now see the Big Chief as he really is.

#1970s #agencyProblem #authority #businessStrategy #celebrityCEO #CEO #consulting #corporateGovernance #cultOfTheCEO #investorCapitalism #leadership #managementTheory #managerialCapitalism #MatthewStewart #MichaelPorter #MichaelUseem #Monitor #myths #RakeshKhurana #sociopaths #SteveDenning #strategy #totem