Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Socialism and social democracy

The term socialism, used from the 1830s onwards in France and England, was directly related to what was called the social question, in essence the problem that the emergence of competitive market societies did not create liberty, equality and fraternity for all citizens, requiring the intervention of politics and social reform to tackle social problems, injustices and grievances a topic on which Jean-Jacques Rousseau discourses at length in his classic work The Social Contract. Originally the term socialist was often used interchangeably with co-operative, mutuality, associations and collectivist.
The term social democracy originally referred to the political project of extending democratic forms of association to the whole of society, substituting popular sovereignty, the universal franchise and social ownership for the rule of a propertied class which had exclusive voting rights.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Color

It is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, yellow, white, etc. Color derives from the spectrum of light distribution of light energy versus wavelength interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors. Color categories and physical specifications of color are also associated with objects, materials, light sources, etc., based on their physical properties such as light absorption, reflection, or emission spectra.

Typically, only features of the composition of light that are detectable by humans wavelength spectrum from 400 nm to 700 nm, roughly are included, thereby objectively relating the psychological phenomenon of color to its physical specification. Since perception of color stems from the varying sensitivity of different types of cone cells in the retina to different parts of the spectrum, colors may be defined and quantified by the degree to which they stimulate these cells. These physical or physiological quantifications of color, however, do not fully explain the psychophysical perception of color appearance.

The science of color is sometimes called chromatics. It includes the perception of color by the human eye and brain, the origin of color in materials, color theory in art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range that is, what we commonly refer to simply as light.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Orgin of Dance

Unlike some early human activities such as the production of stone tools, hunting, cave painting, etc., dance does not leave behind physical artifacts. Thus, it is impossible to say with any certainty when dance became part of human culture. However, dance has certainly been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since the birth of the earliest human civilizations. Archaeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as Egyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures from circa 3300 BC and the Bhimbetka rock-shelter paintings in India.
One of the earliest structured uses of dance may have been in the performative retelling of mythological stories. Indeed, before the introduction of written languages, dance was one of the primary methods of passing these stories down from generation to generation.