To find out how much people naturally sleep, researchers have studied hunter-gatherer communities whose lifestyles are closer to those of our ancestors and who have little or no access to artificial light. In one early study, researchers found that people in Tanzania, Namibia and Bolivia slept for between 5.7 and 7.1 hours a night. These short sleep durations can’t be attributed to traffic noise, social media use or too much artificial light at night.
The short nights also seemed to be enough: people did not make up for them with long daytime naps. Without an alarm clock, they tended to wake close to dawn, regardless of the day of the week.
Exactly how long people are found to sleep in pre-industrialised societies varies depending on how sleep is measured, where people live, the season and other environmental factors. But one recent analysis estimated the average to be 6.4 hours.
Russell Gmirkin’s scholarship presents a radical reevaluation of the origins and composition of the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Pentateuch. His theories, which initially seemed extravagant to some, are rooted in rigorous academic investigation within the framework of “biblical minimalism,” a movement that advocates for a later dating of biblical texts than traditionally accepted. This school, exemplified by scholars like Thomas L. Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche from the Copenhagen International Seminar, has faced severe criticism for challenging the antiquity of the biblical narrative, often being branded as anti-Zionist or even anti-Semitic. However, Gmirkin’s work offers compelling arguments that suggest the Hebrew Pentateuch was conceived in the context of Hellenistic culture, particularly drawing from Greek literature and historical works available in the Library of Alexandria around 273-272 BC.
Gmirkin’s arguments hinge on the notion that the Pentateuch was significantly influenced by Greek texts, particularly works by Berossus and Manetho, who chronicled histories of Babylon and Egypt, respectively. He posits that the Hebrew authors crafted their texts not merely as translations of ancient traditions but as new compositions that cleverly disguised their Greek influences to present an ancient and authoritative Jewish narrative. This method of cultural and textual appropriation, Gmirkin suggests, was a strategic adaptation that allowed Jewish scholars to assert their identity and historical significance in a multicultural world dominated by Hellenistic thought and literature. He identifies the Elephantine papyri, dating from around 400 BC, as evidence that the Pentateuch did not exist in its current form at that time, thereby pushing the potential date of its composition further into the Hellenistic period.
In his first book, “Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus,” Gmirkin meticulously analyzes the similarities between the biblical creation narratives in Genesis and the writings of Berossus. He argues that rather than relying on ancient Mesopotamian sources directly, the authors of Genesis utilized Berossus’s compilation, which provided a cohesive Greek perspective on Babylonian creation stories. Gmirkin’s intertextual analysis reveals structural parallels that suggest the authors of Genesis were likely drawing from Berossus as a source, rather than from the fragmented cuneiform texts that precede it. This assertion simplifies the complex web of influences traditionally attributed to the creation of Genesis, suggesting a direct literary lineage from Berossus to the biblical text rather than a convoluted oral tradition.
Furthermore, Gmirkin’s work explores how the biblical narrative engages critically with Babylonian culture, notably through the depiction of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel. He posits that the serpent in the Garden may reflect a Babylonian archetype, the apkallu Oannes, who represents the transmission of knowledge to humanity. This transformation of a benevolent figure into one of treachery symbolizes a broader critique of civilization itself, depicting knowledge as a source of corruption rather than enlightenment. The Tower of Babel serves as a polemical narrative against urban civilization, echoing sentiments found in other contemporary critiques of city life and cultural amalgamation. Ultimately, Gmirkin’s scholarship not only recontextualizes the origins of the Pentateuch but also sheds light on the cultural dialogues and tensions between Jewish identity and the surrounding Hellenistic world during a formative period in history.
(The above is a summary of a longer article provided by the site it is posted on.)
If true, its analysis of the Torah deeply subverts the belief systems of all of the Abrahamic religions and sects based on it. I would maintain that the vocabularies (psycholinguistics) of all religions should be considered as being mere human attempts at understanding matters which are beyond our human capacities to fully understand, and especially to write down. If we do that, an adherence to any Abrahamic tradition can be understood as valuable insofar as it yields profound spiritual experience and good behavior commensurate with human reason and good morals, granting lots of room for variety of interpretations. This same style of interpretation can and should apply to Buddhism, which it sort of already does. The deep flaw in all of the Abrahamic religions and sects is their intellectually weak and vapid need to cling to ancient texts, even to the letter of ancient texts. This has produced a menagerie of competing adamancies that are so stupid that to this day they are still fighting to the death over what was originally mythic nonsense. Buddhism has always (largely) been deep enough to escape such obvious linguistic and psycholinguistic traps. Buddhism focuses on the morality, the experiences, and the wisdom of its traditions, not the words. Freeing religious believers from legalistic credos and beliefs concerning specific entities, words and events will go a long way toward raising human consciousness while preserving that which was truly good in the past. ABN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is preparing to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum status in the United States. If it happens, the move would be the largest single mass revocation of visas in U.S. history and would likely face legal challenges.
“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” said State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott.
In a social media post on Monday, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau called out people who he said try to use tourist and business visas to get into the United States and then apply for asylum.
“People in the US and all over the world are fed up with bogus asylum claims,” Landau wrote on X. “Asylum isn’t supposed to be a loophole to circumvent immigration law.” Landau cited the case of a Colombian citizen who came to the U.S. in 2015 on a tourist visa and then applied for asylum.
“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then …
…have babies in order to gain US citizenship.” That would be another good way to interpret visa fraud, imo. ABN
At the core of the issue is the administration executive order that requires states to send their voter rolls to the U.S. Postal Service for mail service for mail-in ballots. The USPS would then cross-check with DHS and Social Security records to ensure each of the names and addresses were eligible to vote before mailing them a ballot.
Obviously, the blue states -Democrat States- are refusing to comply with the USPS rule, the reason is simple. A significant number of the blue state registered voters are not eligible voters (illegal aliens etc.) If the states allowed cross-checking of their voter rolls the American people would see just how many illegal voters are registered; this would significantly reshape the U.S. election. The scale of the issue is up for debate.
That said, the anxiety forms the baseline of opposition where blue states are suing in every court possible to stop the postal service requirement. The Trump executive order also directs the Postal Service to block delivery of mail-in ballots entirely from states that refuse to share voter lists with the federal government.
Today the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 [RULING HERE] that lifted one of the lower court injunctions that was filed as a lawsuit in Massachusetts. The court ruled that Boston-based Judge Indira Talwani (Obama appointee) engaged in “a string of speculations to find this suit justiciable.”
Historically, in most if not all, cultures, the inherent stress of speaking has been dealt with by forming hierarchies which define what kinds of speech are acceptable.
Every culture I know of still does this still today, including small subcultures wherever you find them.
Mind control, which is a covert hierarchy of dominant definitions, functions most of all by tagging words and concepts as stressful or not.
No culture anywhere throughout all of history has ever discovered the FIML technique due to the ubiquitous human allergy to stressful speech.
Once you get the hang of it, FIML is the opposite of stressful. FIML removes speech stress at its most basic level.
That’s also why it is hard to see and do FIML at first. ABN
Gender-fluid police officers have been handed two warrant cards so they can identify as a man one day and a woman the next, The Telegraph can reveal.
Forces including those in Suffolk, Norfolk and Leicestershire confirmed they had issued more than one card to officers who said they identified as both male and female.
…In Decoded Neurofeedback experiments, brain scanning is used to monitor activity in the brain, and identify complex patterns of activity that resemble a specific memory or mental state. When the pattern is detected, we give our experimental participants a small reward. The simple action of repeatedly providing a reward every time the pattern is detected modifies the original memory or mental state. Importantly, participants do not need to be aware of the patterns’ content for this to work.
A central challenge in neuroscience is decoding brain activity to uncover mental content comprising multiple components and their interactions. Despite progress in decoding language-related information from human brain activity, generating comprehensive descriptions of complex mental content associated with structured visual semantics remains challenging. We present a method that generates descriptive text mirroring brain representations via semantic features computed by a deep language model. Constructing linear decoding models to translate brain activity induced by videos into semantic features of corresponding captions, we optimized candidate descriptions by aligning their features with brain-decoded features through word replacement and interpolation. This process yielded well-structured descriptions that accurately capture viewed content, even without relying on the canonical language network. The method also generalized to verbalize recalled content, functioning as an interpretive interface between mental representations and text and simultaneously demonstrating the potential for nonverbal thought–based brain-to-text communication, which could provide an alternative communication pathway for individuals with language expression difficulties, such as aphasia.
…Fig. 2. Generating viewed content descriptions.
Descriptions were generated using features from all LM layers decoded from whole-brain activity. (A) Evolved descriptions during the optimization (see https://horikawa-t.github.io/MindCaptioningProject/ for more results with the original videos). (B) Descriptions after 100 iterations for all subjects (see fig. S3A for more example). In (A) and (B), the color indicates accuracy [inverse document frequency (IDF)–weighted BERTScore-P]. A reference caption of the video is shown below frames. (C) Feature correlations between features of generated descriptions and those decoded from the brain, as well as those computed from correct references. (D) Cohen’s d of discriminability (see fig. S4B for raw scores). Feat. corr., Feature correlation. (E) Video identification accuracy with varying numbers of candidates. (F) Effects of word-order shuffling on video identification accuracy and discriminability. (G) Scatterplot of the correlation distances (one minus feature correlation) between the original and shuffled descriptions against the difference in feature correlations to target features between original and shuffled descriptions. Each dot indicates a shuffled description. Shades in (C) and (E) and error bars in (D) and (F) indicate 95% confidence intervals (CIs) across samples (n = 72). Shades in (D) and (F) indicate 95% CI across subjects (n = 6). See fig. S4 for individual results.
The content of sensory consciousness gropingly captured by machines but not the consciousness itself. This is no match for FIML depth, artistry or soundness, but interesting nevertheless. It may well be that in the future when machines can do almost everything, the only thing humans will be able to do that machines cannot will be FIML practice. Is it ironic or poetic that the one thing humans have not widely understood before the advent of AI is the one thing AI will never be able to do? (FIML predates AI by many years, but very few understand it even to this day.) One reason, among many, FIML is hard to understand is due to Sapir-Whorf ‘cognitive blindness’, if you will. People can’t see it because no one has ever seen it until relatively recently; it’s not in the general language. FIML is described from many angles in many posts on this website. If you are a smart person, it’s easy to understand once you remove your Sapir-Whorf sunglasses. If you are a bold thinker, go for it. You will come to understand something very deep that few others can see. If you just want to be psychologically much healthier, FIML will do that for you as well. ABN
There are several previous findings, both theoretical and experimental, that have paved the way toward the view of human evolution as the “survival of the wittiest,” subject to sexual selection, offering better explanatory power than the “survival of the friendliest.” While research on language evolution has largely neglected the artistic dimension, the fitness in humans is correlated with linguistic eloquence, including humor. This is one of those cases where science can only explain a phenomenon by considering its artistic dimension, and in which linguistic creativity and genetics come into direct contact. My argument is that selection for quick-wittedness (using and combining words in a clever and funny way), specific to language and unique to humans, needs to be added to the complex picture of human evolution, relevant from the earliest stages of language/grammar. Wittiness is a trait that allows competition (by “outwitting” others) while at the same time favoring “friendliness” in that it provides an excellent platform for replacing physical aggression with verbal behavior and cognitive contest, the hallmarks of human nature. This proposal is based on a precise linguistic reconstruction of the earliest stages of grammar, providing linguistic detail (“living fossils”) necessary for hypothesis testing, including neuroimaging experiments.
A good deal of reasoning about humans requires considering its artistic dimension. Birth-control has surely negated the evolutionary advantage of being the wittiest, as overall, intelligent couples have been most likely to use it. Where there is wittiness and artistry, there is also nastiness and ugliness. The importation of civilization-ending numbers of nasty invaders whose behavior is known to be ugly is an example happening before our eyes. While the nasty humans at the top, those in positions of controlling the invasion, may be clever, even witty, they are ugly people. In human societies sh*t all too often rises to the top. As for considering the artistic dimension of things human, I would like to emphasize two topics which, to be understood, require that of us: 1) FIML and 2) the covert war the West has been subjected to for over 100 years and especially since the nominal end of WW2. That covert war has been extremely violent, almost invisible, gruesomely successful, nasty and ugly, and, as of today, seemingly unstoppable. It requires the artistry of military imagination and reasoning to comprehend why and how it is being waged. Reasoning back from that, an abundance of convincing circumstantial evidence becomes manifestly obvious. When all roads lead to the demise of the West and the causes can be established, it becomes clear who is doing it and why. ABN
The family of Iryna Zarutska has filed a lawsuit against the City of Charlotte for alleged ‘systemic failures’ a year after the US was rattled by her horrific murder aboard a tram.
Zarutska was fatally stabbed while riding a CATS light rail train on August 22, 2025. The nation was shocked by footage allegedly showing DeCarlos Brown Jr stabbing the 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee in the neck, leaving her bleeding and begging those on the busy tram for help before she died.
The Queen City and its private transit security contractor, Professional Security Services (PSS), were named in the suit for allegedly knowing about the dangers on or around the light rail system before her death, according to the filing cited by WBTV.
The filing, brought by Lauren Newton, an attorney representing the family, claimed that ‘systemic failures’ left the CATS system vulnerable.
Are your thought patterns valid? Are your premises true? Is your mind sound?
Buddhism further asks are your mental states wholesome? Are they conducive to enlightenment, wisdom, freedom from delusion?
There are many things we can do while alone to clean up our thought processes. And there are some things we can only do with the help of another person.
Only another person can tell us if our premises, thoughts, and conclusions (however tentative) about them are true, valid, and sound.
Buddhism has a concept of a “spiritual friend,” a “good friend,” a noble friend,” or an “admirable friend.” All of these terms are translations of the Pali Kalyāṇa-mittatā, which is well-explained at that link. (Chinese 善知識.）
From the link above and from many years of working with Buddhist literature and people, my sense is that a Buddhist “good friend” is someone who is to be admired and emulated. They are similar to what we mean today by mentors or “good role models.”
I deeply respect the concept of a Buddhist good friend, but find it lacks what I consider the preeminent virtue of philosophical psychology—real-time honesty based on a teachable technique.
Indeed, I cannot find anything anywhere in world philosophy, religion, or literature that provides a teachable technique for attaining real-time honesty with another person.
I also do not quite understand how this could be.
For many centuries human beings have thought about life but no one has come up with a technique like FIML?
How can that be?
I do not see a technique like FIML anywhere in the history of human philosophy nor anywhere in modern psychology.
The importance of a “good friend” who does FIML with you cannot be overemphasized because it is only through such a friend that you can discover where your premises about them are right or wrong, where your thoughts about them are valid or not, and through those discoveries where your mind itself is arranged soundly or not.
American Buddhist Net 