(Part 3) Top products from r/RedditDayOf

Yoga is a monistic practice in Hinduism. The practice revolves not around god(s) but instead is practiced through exploring inward. This is done through mediation. In fact, the yogis were the ones who developed the iconic lotus position we all have come to associate with meditation. The yoga sutras outline steps to enlightenment, The yogic ultimate reality is "oneness." That is, realizing the inner-most self (atman) is indistinct from the universal spirit (brahman), aka the Absolute.

The wikipedia article doesn't quite do this text justice. The sutras are a dense text, one Wikipedia or any other article I could find on the internet doesn't really expand upon well. If you are interested in learning more about them, I recommend this book.

I grew up on Encyclopedia Brown. Some of his mysteries became a bit dated over time, but still sound.

My biggest issue - and it actually isn't with the Encyclopedia Brown character himself - was the lending of his name to:

Encyclopedia Brown's Record Book of Weird and Wonderful Facts

This was one of those "Weird Fact" books that all nerds loved back in the day. Filled with trivia and mundane "facts" about all sorts of things.

And so many of them were utter poppycock.

I cringe to think of how many of these "factoids" I regurgitated. How much erroneous information did I squirrel away in my brain that was wrong. Must I second guess everything I ever knew?

Donald Sobol wasn't the only perpetrator of mis-information. But I trusted Encyclopedia Brown and by extension, I trusted Mr. Sobol. And it is this book that burns in my memory as a pillar of fabrication and fancy.


Edit - I went ahead and bought a copy for the singular purpose of determining how much of it is crap.

The Leslie Nielsen one is hilarious (and hugely a fabrication) and Fisher is credited on the cover. Well worth tracking a copy down.

Great post! Jack Zipes has a new version of the original Grimm's out now too.

His original paper can be found here. If you find it a bit dense then you may be interested in reading an annotated version of his work found from this wonderful book.

>You might be interested in the book Tears of My Soul by Hyun Hee Kim. She was the North Korean spy who helped blow up a Korean Airlines flight 585 in 1987. She was caught and sentenced to death in South Korea and then pardoned. She wrote Tears of My Soul after that, in it she talks about her life in N.K, training as a spy, and her impressions of the Western world and South Korea when being confronted with it. Well worth reading. Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Tears-Soul-Hyun-Hee-Kim/dp/0688128335/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264467525&sr=1-1

>Wiki on her: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Hyon_Hui

Source: Are there any video's of people from North Korea visiting the western world showing their first reaction?

He already made a book titled "Just A Geek".

It's narrated by Harrison Ford, if that flutters your geek flag. E.O. Wilson also helped write a pretty definitive ant book.

x-post from /r/knitting where someone told me about you folks.

My niece is a big time math/physics nerd so for Christmas last year I made her a scarf based on the book "17 Equations that Changed the World."

I gave up on trying to find the photo of the finished product. I took this and joined it into a möbius that she would wear as a double-twisted cowl.

The scarf was accompanied by this book as a Christmas present: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465085989/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s02?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Unfortunately I don't since I read that in a book more than ten years ago. Hah. So I guess I can say I'm pretty sure those are the facts (at least according to that one book). I believe this is the book. I remember it being good but I don't think my knowledge of true crime books was very well developed then so it could be total crap!

I don't think they'd seen flying foxes before. Fact source was this book which is horribly outdated in the biology section.

T.L;D.R- The Crusaders already sacked another Christian city before hand.
Basically, the crusaders went to Venice for help and they promised to pay them to build the largest fleet the world had seen up until that point. A year later when the crusaders did show up about half of the expected numbers did. They leaders also didn't half enough funds to pay for it. So they were forced to wait around Venice for a few months while they tried to figure it out. The Venicens came up with an idea. They said, If you help us recapture the city of Zara, (which had rebelled), then we will lower the cost of the ships. Zara being a Christian city should not have been attacked. Well they did it anyway. They also sacked it to Teach them a lesson; you don't fuck with the Venetians. When news reached Rome the Pope sent a messenger, who was held captive so that he couldn't go back to tell the Pope to excommunicate them. The Crusaders still didn't have enough money but then got a stroke of "luck". A pretender from the Byzantine Empire was willing to pay them if they helped him take the throne. So the Venetians agreed, because for them it would help them out to have a Emperor that liked them in the largest trade port in the western world. When the crusaders stop over to pick up the Pretender Emperor, in Corfu, they already had been Excommunicated. They then headed off to Constantinople. Where they sieged and captured the city. They placed their pretender on the throne and waited for him to get the money together. While they were waiting another pretender took the throne. Now the Crusaders were kind of fucked. They had been excommunicated while they were trying to save their souls and their only way to save that they had to save the crusade was just killed. They said fuck it and sacked the city and they all basically went home from there. Worst Crusade Ever
Source-City of Fortune by Roger Crowley + Education