Time And Culture Essays (444 words) - Anthropology, Circadian Rhythm

Time And Culture In The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), anthropologist Edward T. Hall entitles his first chapter Time as Culture. An extreme stance perhaps, especially given the potency of nature's rhythms, but it is instructive of the extent to which experiences and conceptualizations of time and space are culturally determined. Unlike the rest of nature's animals, our environment is primarily man-made and symbolic in quality. As Bronowski observed in The Ascent of Man, instead of being figures of the landscape, like antelopes upon the African savanna, we humans are the shapers of it. Geographical space and natural time are transformed into social space and social time, around whose definitions human beings orient their behaviors. For instance, instead of being governed by the natural rhythms of the sun and seasons, our behaviors are governed by such cultural temporalities as work schedules, age norms, and by the open hours of shopping malls. Culture is a shared system of ideas about the nature of the world and how (and when) people should behave in it. Cultural theorists argue that culture creates minds, selves and emotions in a society as reliably as DNA creates the various tissues of a living body. Culture also creates the rhythms of a society that echo within the very biology of its members. Observes Irving Hallowell (Temporal Orientation in Western Civilization and in a Pre-Literate Society, American Anthropologist 36, 1955), It is impossible to assume that man is born with any innate `temporal sense.' His temporal concepts are always culturally constituted (pp. 216-7). A 1974 study by William Condon and Louis Sander showed that within a few days, infants flex their limbs and move their heads in rhythms matching the human speech around them. By the time a child is three months old he has already been temporally enculturated, having internalized the external rhythms (called Zeitgeber, meaning time giver in German) of his culture. These rhythms underlie a people's language, music, religious ritual (the Buddhist mantra, for instance, is not only one's personal prayer but one's personal rhythm), beliefs about post-mortem fate, and their poetry and dance. These rhythms also serve as a basis of solidarity: humans are universally attracted to rhythm and to those who share their cadences of talk, movement, music, and sport. Thus socio-cultural systems can be likened to massive musical scores: change the rhythm-- such as putting a funeral dirge to a calypso beat--and you change the meaning of the piece. Cultures differ temporally, for example, in the temporal precision with which they program everyday events (ask any American businessman trying to schedule a meeting in the Middle East) and in the ways various social rhythms are allowed to mesh. Anthropology

10 Interesting Facts About Atoms

10 Interesting Facts About Atoms Everything in the world consists of atoms, so its good to know something about them. Here are 10 interesting and useful atom facts. There are three parts to an atom. Protons have a positive electrical charge and are found together with neutrons (no electrical charge) in the nucleus of each atom. Negatively charged electrons orbit the nucleus.Atoms are the smallest particles that make up elements. Each element contains a different number of protons. For example, all hydrogen atoms have 1 proton while all carbon atoms have 6 protons.  Some matter consists of one type of atom (e.g., gold), while other matter is made of atoms bonded together to form compounds (e.g., sodium chloride).Atoms are mostly empty space. The nucleus of an atom is extremely dense and contains nearly all of the mass of each atom. Electrons contribute very little mass to the atom (it takes 1,836 electrons to equal the size of a proton)  and orbit so far away from the nucleus that each atom is 99.9% empty space. If the atom was the size of a sports arena, the nucleus would be the size of a pea. Although the nucleus is much denser compared wit h the rest of the atom, it too consists mainly of empty space.​ There are over 100 different kinds of atoms. About 92 of them occur naturally, while the remainder are made in labs. The first new atom made by man was technetium, which has 43 protons.  New atoms can be made by adding more protons to an atomic nucleus. However, these new atoms (elements) are unstable and decay into smaller atoms instantaneously. Usually, we only know a new atom was created by identifying the smaller atoms from this decay.The components of an atom are held together by three forces. Protons and neutrons are held together by the strong and weak nuclear forces. Electrical attraction holds electrons and protons. While electrical repulsion repels protons away from each other, the attracting nuclear force is much stronger than electrical repulsion. The strong force that binds together protons and neutrons is 1,038 times more powerful than gravity, but it acts over a very short range, so particles need to be very close to each other to feel its effect.The word atom comes from the Greek word for uncuttable or undivided. The name comes from the 5th century BCE Greek philosopher Democritus, who believed matter consisted of particles that could not be cut into smaller particles. For a long time, people believed atoms were the fundamental uncuttable unit of matter. While atoms are the building blocks of elements, that can be divided into still smaller particles. Also, nuclear fission and nuclear decay can break atoms into smaller atoms. Atoms are very small. The average atom is about one-tenth of a  billionth of a meter across. The largest atom (cesium) is approximately nine times bigger than the smallest atom (helium).Although atoms are the smallest unit of an element, they consist of even tinier particles called quarks and leptons. An electron is a lepton. Protons and neutrons consist of three quarks each.The most abundant type of atom in the universe is the hydrogen atom. Nearly 74% of the atoms in the Milky Way galaxy are hydrogen atoms.You have around 7 billion billion billion atoms in your body, yet you replace about 98% of them every year! Take an Atom Quiz