Place to share relaxing and thought-provoking videos

I love the Blues, so for me this biographical documentary about Blues giant Muddy Waters is mesmerizing. It is also very well made, including loads of photographs, film clips, music, and interviews with famous Blues musicians and Rockers.

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For starters, Ibrahimovic isn’t the type to say anything with complete honesty, and for reasons like this, I don’t take top footballers seriously because their egos (especially players like Ibrahimovic) are greater than their reason, and most of their words come across as cheap wannabe intelligent advice with no real foundation behind it.

This is a bit “thought-provoking” in and of itself :slight_smile:

A) I never knew that Ibrahimovic had a propensity of lying, though in this case he is talking about his opinion, so facts are not in the discussion.
B) I don’t see why him having such a propensity would shine a bad light on other totally unrelated footballers.
C) There is a certain amount of ego involved into becoming famous and “world-class level” on any profession, even those that do not come along with fame and money like football or music or acting or whatever else people like to obsess over. So the ego point/issue could actually apply to any famous people or athletes.

So what? Even in their attempt to SOUND intelligent, they might actually say something really intelligent. :slight_smile:
Intent and “who says what” is very important when someone tries to dupe you with something dishonest e.g. you work for a cigarette manufacturer and you produce a research saying that “smoking cures alzheimers” or some biased non-sense like that.
But on just opinions on life, that is not really applicable since noone is an expert on life anyway.

At the end of the day, if you re-think about it, footballers and team-sport athletes in general can actually have some very interesting outlooks about life because they have some advantages compared to other professions:

a) They are forced to travel a lot and mingle with other cultures even if they never move to another club (as a Center Back in a Greek team said “after almost two decades of playing for this club, I learned to say ‘pass me the ball’ in 25 languages”)
b) A lot of them are forced to move around a lot, in totally different countries, and live on their own and manage their own finances and fame from very early on. This gives them a lot of real life experience, especially compared to people their age.
c) They are forced to sacrifice a lot for their success and more often than not, most people doing all that effort do not even succeed initially (e.g. Jamie Vardy), or ever, which is quite the life-lesson.
d) Even those that are wacky (e.g. Good’ol town drunk Paul Gascoigne or the party-animal Romario) can serve as a “what to avoid” example, exactly because they are famous.

Fun, but on point (the same things apply for basketball players) about going to bizarre places and meeting odd people. Here is Eddie Johnson talking about his coach Giannis Ioannidis (one of the most unhinged coaches of Europe, ever) and how Johnson adapted to the situation:

(it is in English with Greek subititles so there is no language barrier)

The full video is quite insightful since Johnson is talking about overcoming his problems in general and the experience/process of adapting to a new culture:

I think you took this too seriously.

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Hey, it is half the topic. Half of it is relaxing, half of it is about thoughts and since your reply provokes some thoughts, I wrote them down :slight_smile:

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Rare people that everyone respects, for good reasons.

Mind boggling physics video:

Somehow, English speakers always pronounce the “oo” in the name of Dutch physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft as the vowel in “flute”, “boot”, “loo”, “sue”, “goo”, “do” or “newt”. It should be pronounced as the vowel in “float”, “boat”’, “low”, “so”, “go”, “dough” or “note”.

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oh, no! I do not like coffee :stuck_out_tongue:

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That was amazing! Machining and general crafting is something I definitely want to add to my knowledge and practical hobbies before I kick the bucket. Speaking of which:

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Supercomputer simulation by NASA:

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The title is sarcastic towards modern clickbait, without it really being clickbait itself :sweat_smile:

His list about discerning actual news from the usual slop of clickbait where actually pretty good and very notable.

I’ll quote just this, out of them:
Four: Always be aware that once the news became a profit division of media companies, they stopped being in the news business and are now in the audience stroking business. The goal is no longer to inform opinions, its to re-inforce them. Walter Cronkite used to say “That’s the way it is”. Now it’s “That’s our story and we are sticking to it”. Narrative first, whole story never. […] NewsNation reported this year that “The USA is on track for nearly 300% increase in measles cases”.
300 per cent! WOW! That sounds like it could be millions.
It was 35.
Because they just want to manipulate you into clicking.

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I stopped reading clickbait articles and videos a while ago and I agree that information quality has decreased compared to (say) 20 years ago. However

I think this has always been the case. People who buy right-wing newspapers don’t want to read stories about rich people evading taxes while poor people are suffering because their employers don’t respect their rights. People who buy left-wing newspapers don’t want to read stories about poor people who don’t want to get a job and steal/murder people or sell drugs instead, etc.
It’s not that information in newspapers is wrong, but it tends to show only one side of the truth.

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I will agree that even from the era of newspapers the concept of the newspaper having a certain bias and thus, a certain target group of people who have the same opinions and biases would buy the newspaper. “Yes Prime Minister” back in the eighties had an amazing 2 minute clip on that exact issue, practically confirming what you say that this has been happening for quite a few decades (if not forever):

The only thing that I want to add is that what has changed is the direction from which this operates (think the usual “the chicken laid the egg or the egg made the chicken” kind of thing). In the past, the newspapers, as a medium, knew that their audience probably had a certain ideology, but they also had some advanced level of understanding of things, just by being able to read to such a good extend as to buy the newspaper in the first place. This is how we had such articles as this, actually printed in newspapers in the 1950-1960 era:

This article is now tought in schools (were I actually was introduced to the author) and you might be surprised to hear that it is quite above the level of understanding of the average high-school student here, at this age (were we supposedly have a higher education), yet the newspaper that was simply called “The News” actually printed this in an era where kids used to go to school holding candles for lighting the way and still wrote on black slates. :thinking:

It sounds like a paradox since you would think that today we would be more educated and more keen to write and read (consume, if you will), such high-thought articles from the news, but that is not the case. The opposite has happened. With the advent of new media (radio, then TV and now the internet) the common denominator of the “news consumer” has lowered and lowered from the “educated class that can actually read” to the “utter moron that cannot even understand how percentages work during elections”, thus not only the downwards swift in quality and quantity, but also the reversal of the flow of news.

Once, the journalists wrote the news, based on what was going on, to satisfy the actual curiosity for useful news of a specific/linited target group of people of some educational quality.
Now that the target group is everyone, the base needs of the crowd to see its opinions reflected and stocked/supported, creates an unlimited market for the sea of non-news, opinion pieces and clickbait sludge, where there is almost no need for veracity other than a thin veneer of accuracy, just to avoid lawsuits for slander. And so we have fake … sorry … “alternative news” for everyone. From Flat Earthers to people that believe that drinking bleach is good for treating a virus.

So, yes, even “back in the day” a newspaper wanted to make money, but it couldn’t target the vast masses that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) read, thus they had to uphold a higher standard of journalism and quality of articles, else those readers would notice and the target group of readers would become even smaller.
Now, we even have Twitter for those with the attention span of an actual sparrow (and that is insulting to sparrows) and they are perfectly happy with “few words of outrageous snippets” and off they go, without even checking if that small snippet is even true or not, even though the we live in the “era of information” and they have the means to look for sources and double-check (an ability that the people of the newspaper era didn’t have). :roll_eyes:

If you would like a suggestion, the 1985 book by Neil Postman “Amusing ourselves to death” explains the how and why of this quality shift in news, a lot better than I ever could. The book is mostly about the radical change the news underwent from “newspaper article” to “television show”, but you can extrapolate it for the modern internet era, since all that happened was turbo-charging that process to the maximum possible.

For a funnier, but oddly equally interesting read, Terry Pratchett’s “The Truth” is actually amazing on the subject of newspapers and how the public views the news.

I agree that back in the day, most people didn’t read newspapers, but I wouldn’t say that the standard of journalism was always high, especially in tabloids, but even “serious” newspapers or magazines can be quite misinformed. You don’t realize that until they talk about a subject that you now well.

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No argument there. :slight_smile:
I actually wrote something similar in a newspaper article 6+ years ago. (not sure if it can be autotranslated)

At the end of the day a news media, be it an old style newspaper or a modern website, has its limitations depending on the employed staff. For example, in our local newspaper the only “actual reporter” was the owner of the newspaper. Was she supposed to know about everything that happened in the area? From sports, to the laws about proper buildings, from the agricultural matter and what each local tree/farm needs to what is the situation in the forest and what is best of the seafront islands?
Of course not.
And that’s just mostly practical stuff. If we were to write anything about science, math, computers, new technology and a thousand other topics, she knew nothing about them. What was expected of her? To just report an issue or educate herself for hours before writing each article? So, she just wrote whatever thought she could safely say about whatever article/issue came along.
Most of the time she was misinformed and ignorant herself, however, in most of these cases the people reading the newspaper didn’t know anything about the topic, so, at the very least a small single step was done towards learning something. :slight_smile:

Sometimes she happened to be very passionate about things she had no idea about. I recall at least two instances where I talked her out of writing some sentences that would have caused her and the newspaper to be sued to oblivion. :sweat_smile:

Noone really expects excellency or perfection or polymathy from a journalist. Some integrity and an honest effort to inform the public would actually make someone today stand out head-and-shoulders above what is now “the average journalist”.

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Highly informative technical discussion:

Charismatic and well informed discusson about fire safety codes in the US from an ingress/egress background

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I knew about pitch correction and auto-tune, but had no idea these things had completely taken over. To paraphrase the presenter: no one listens anymore; all they do is watch lines on a screen!

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