As the Indian Wars dialed down in the late 1800's, eastern institutions sent ethnographers to study the fallen first Americans. Alfred Kroeber, one of the early pioneers was sent to study the Southern Arapaho in the then Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), then visited the Northern Arapaho in Wyoming finally the similar Gros Ventre in Montana. His studies were published first, like most academics then, in four separate volumes of the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Kroeber's study is a masterwork and is copiously illustrated.

These two groupings at bottom: 1) Game pieces for a memory game similar to Concentration. 2) Paint pouches.

An Anthro-Bio-Chemist, Ott has botanically observed hundreds, perhaps thousands of plants that yield varying amounts of altered states, from a library and research lab in Mexico, recently damaged by arson. For proof of his studies, check out Pharmacotheon. He analyzes many chemical forms, shows inferior paths, and discusses policy and history. Footnotes tell the real story, and are half the size of each chapter. Continuing Gordon Wasson's unusual and maybe ground-breaking constructions of ancient ceremonies utilizing medicinal tools that altered users, Ott writes the only ethnopharmacogosy of entheogenic drugs. A chemical zoom lens into the brain. Volume 2 is delayed, but Volume 1 is a must have.

A man who leads a news conglomerate lies to lawmakers in front of millions. Are humans practicing rampant self-deception?

With so many dark issues ahead for collective human survival, hasn't the time come for a global code above the corporation?

When corruption is so endemic, participants have little awareness of how it all looks from the outside. Here is The Guardian's breakdown of Scotland Yard's Sir Paul Stephenson's resignation letter, Chapter x of the great News Corporation scandal, timed on the eve of the PM's departure for Africa, to achieve maximum shock value in Monday morning news. So jarring was the letter the PM turned his plane around and called an emergency meeting to save his government. The Guardian, which broke the story two weeks ago, remains the paper of record for the affair.

From The Economist, Hydrogen antimatter now can be stored, observed and then destroyed to examine the remains. The video attached to the article is essential.

A crucial feature of the current century will be the folding of all of the major thought sectors, principally philosophy but also including religion, math, even myth, into science. Some default proof by examples, proving the possibilities through failure or terminal states of logic:

The current head of Harvard's Dept. of Philosophy co-pens a work of bleak, reaching positivism and Garry Wills submits the guillotine, a scathing review. A review that openly calls into question the skills of our current thinkers. They appear both weak and wholly materialistic, subordinate to the advertising they've been coded with (the Harvard dupe is a baby boomer). Rephrasing Homer to do their bidding, they employ the West's poeticism via error-prone translation, not the original meaning in Greek. And not the coordinate comprehension of the myths of Homer either. Late in the review Wills quotes extensively to shatter their work.  Note how they turn Starbuck's advertised myth into a ritual of great significance. They posit the grinding and steeping of coffee as a ritual. Whoa, the material seems purely sarcastic, far beyond anything the self-help genre could cook up, it's their worst move: misusing the term ritual so radically, the book can be read as an attempt to cleanse a key word of danger or adventure.  Coffee is a ceremony, just like tea. Their response, linked at the review's end, and Wills's reaction is a minor sequel but worth it.

Another link, Stanford's Philosophy Wiki: the madness over causation. Listen boys, let quantum manage what philosophy can barely imagine-

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/

Although upper education has existed for millenia, its organization into a clerical then secular form took place with style in Europe, with 12th Century medieval beginnings in Italy then Paris, followed by Oxford. Below is a time-colored map to explain the growth and reach of the college/university in Europe and a layout of Paris's Latin Quarter, ostensibly the first 'campus' with numerous colleges making up a total collective (each number on that map represents a college). Later universities collect these disparate ideas begun in the Latin Quarter and assemble 'pure' universities instead.