Everything in the universe

Music Eases Pain I f you’re going to be undergoing a medical procedure, or you struggle with chronic pain, reaching for your playlist may be as good as reaching for a bottle of pain pills. The power of music for relaxation, stress relief, and pain reduction is undeniable, although individual research studies proving the same were too small to show a strong connection. That all changed when researchers pooled the data from 73 randomized clinical trials focusing on the role of music among surgery patients. Researcher Dr. Catherine Meads at Brunel University told NPR: “As the studies themselves were small, they really didn’t find all that much… But once we put them all together, we had much more power to find whether music worked or not.” Music  therapy reduces pain and  anxiety  by 50% and  is  important for children and adults alike. A study in Germany showed that pain and  anxiety  were significantly reduced with  music  t...

Matrix The Purpose of the Matrix Why the Matrix? Why did the machines do it? (Human brains may be many things, but efficient batteries they are not.) How could they justify a world whose inhabitants are systematically deceived about their fundamental reality, ignorant about the reason why they exist, and subject to all the cruelty and suffering that we witness in the world around us? Children dying of AIDS; lovers separated by war and poverty; cancer patients tormented by unbearable pain; stroke victims deprived of their use of language and reason… One would think nobody but a sadist could have the imagination to think up these horrors, much less possess the desire to create a world that contains them in such abundance. But the machines did it, at least that’s how the story goes. Although the world of the Matrix they created is far from perfect, it is – arguably – better than no world at all, the elimination of all human beings. Still, the machines could have created a wo...