Plum is a 2024 Australian television drama for ABC Television, released on 20 October 2024. Created and written by Brendan Cowell, the series follows Peter Lum, a retired former rugby league player who is diagnosed with a brain disorder following years of concussions he suffered on the field.
Plum TV Guide: Everything you need to know about episodes, cast and production team
The TV series of PLUM is due to screen on the ABC at 8.30pm Sunday 20 October 2024.
The filming of the series was undertaken at various locations across the Sutherland Shire including Sylvania, Cronulla and Loftus, over a period of 15 January – 22 February 2024. Council provided permits and support for the high impact filming to be undertaken which will spotlight the LGA.
The Story:
“Plum follows Peter ‘The Plum’ Lum (Brendan Cowell), a 49-year-old national football treasure who lives with his son Gavin (Vincent Miller) and girlfriend Charmaine (María Dupláa) in Cronulla. Plum is a legend in the rugby league world and on the streets of Cronulla. It looks like Plum is living the dream until he discovers he has a brain disorder as result of the hundreds of head knocks he suffered on the field.
The new diagnosis doesn’t receive its intended effect, as Plum would sooner hide, run and head to the pub for drinks with the boys and pretend everything is peaches. But hiding from the truth isn’t easy when your ex-wife (Asher Keddie) cares too much and your son comes to realise the father he worships is falling off his mantle and the game they love might be to
The controversial origins of war and peace: apes, foragers, and human evolution (PDF) Evolution and Human Behavior
I know beauty but I do not know what it means. Keats said that beauty is truth and so did the Greeks, although the one was concerned with loveliness and the others mainly with intellect. I do know that whatever beauty is, whether it is the kind that is woven within the mind itself or is perceived without, on this earth only the human mind can sense it… And inasmuch as we ourselves, in body, brain or mind, are as integral a part of the universe as any star, it makes little difference whether we say beauty lies only in the mind of the beholder or otherwise. We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter.
With an eye to the creative impulse that is part of our humanity, part of the true nature of the universe that we refract, he echoes poet Robinson Jeffers’s moving meditation on moral beauty and adds:
Somehow, as our brains have grown beyond a certain complexity and size, beauty emerged both as perception and as creation. We know it when we meet it and we create it when we can. And we know it in many forms and not only in sublimated senses — we know it when love becomes selfless and solicitude becomes compassion. We see it in moral stature and in hope and courage. We see it whenever the transcending quality of growth is clear and unmistakable, knowing that only in such growth do we find our own individual happiness.
Berrill considers one thing beauty shares with love (which both share with the first of William James’s four features of transcendent experiences):
We can express them with words but cannot define them — we can only say that this and this are included but that is not, and wordlessly we all recognise the truth of it. Speech is limited, no matter what the language…. For in our hearts we understand more than we can possibly talk about.
A century after Walt Whitman called himself a “kosmos” and insisted that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Berrill intimates that this ineffable knowledge is a way of knowing ourselves, of anchoring ourselves to time and meaning as we evolve over the course of a lifetime and face our finitude. In consonance with Annie Dillard’s piercing insistence that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” he writes:
Your day’s activity, mental and physical, is a part of you and by extension you are all that you have ever been — like an unfinished symphony.
[…]
I believe… that during the closing notes of an individual life the question, if any, should be not do I have an immortal soul and what comes next, but how much of a soul have I grown? Whether individual consciousness persists at all… all that lives, all that has lived, retains its value and its meaning… I believe the past lives, that the present is eternal, and the future immanent; that we take it as an indivisible whole and that our obsession with the sweep and drama of history, our probing with fossils and other symbols of time, and our efforts to constructs theories of evolution of life and matter, are all in keeping with the craving to recreate in the human mind the unity of the universe in all its dimensions. The fact that we are so concerned and make such attempts to do this is much more significant than the results we may obtain. Space and time unite in the mind, in the organism, and in the universe as one all-inclusive whole.
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Art Technica: “Between 1400 and 1775, a significant upsurge of witch trials swept acrossearly-modern Europe, resulting in the execution of an estimated 40,000–60,000 accused witches. Historians and social scientists have long studied this period in hopes of learning more about how large-scale social changes occur.
Some have pointed to the invention of the printing press and the publication of witch-hunting manuals—most notably the highly influential Malleus maleficarum—as a major factor, making it easier for the witch-hunting hysteria to spread across the continent.
The abrupt emergence of the craze and its rapid spread, resulting in a pronounced shift in social behaviors—namely, the often brutal persecution of suspected witches—is consistent with a theory of social change dubbed “ideational diffusion,” according to a new paper published in the journal Theory and Society. There is the introduction of new ideas, reinforced by social networks, that eventually take root and lead to widespread behavioral changes in a society…
For cases like the spread of witch trials, “It’s not just that people are coming into contact with a new idea, but that there has to be something cognitively that is happening,” said Doten-Snitker.
“People have to grapple with the ideas and undergo some kind of idea adoption. We talk about this as reinterpreting the social world. They have to rethink what’s happening around them in ways that make them think that not only are these attractive new ideas, but also those new ideas prescribe different types of behavior.
You have to act differently because of what you’re encountering.” The authors chose to focus on social networks and trade routes for their analysis of the witch trials, building on prior research that prioritized broader economic and environmental factors. Cultural elites were already exchanging ideas through letters, but published books added a new dimension to those exchanges.
Researchers studying 21st century social contagion can download massive amounts of online data from social networks. That kind of data is sparse from the medieval era. “We don’t have the same archives of communication,” said Doten-Snitker. “There’s this dual thing happening: the book itself, and people sharing information, arguing back and forth with each other” about new ideas…”