A World of Secrets: 2 (The Firewall Trilogy, 2)

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Discover more traditional places in Japan. First stop is a good view of the Gassho-zukuri farmhouses in Shirakawa-go and Gokayama, Japan. Get historic with these traditional guest houses.

A digital rendering of the Ark of the Covenant. The bible has detailed descriptions of this holy object, but it was lost millennia ago and will likely never be recovered. (Image credit: jgroup via Getty Images) Before his ignominious death, Kidd captured and plundered many ships. But the one of that got him in hot water was the Quedagh Merchant, a Moorish trading ship laden with gold, silver, silks, satins and other treasures from India. Kidd claimed it was a legitimate target, given it was controlled by the French. But it had an English captain and Indian merchandise, and the Moghul emperor at the time threatened to close off trade routes for the East India Company in response, Reuters reported.

Research and Practice

Thousands of lichen-covered stone jars from the Iron Age, some standing close to 10 feet tall and weighing several tons, dot the mountainous landscape of northern Laos. Carved largely from sandstone and found in groups ranging from just one to 400, legend holds that giants used them as wine glasses. Many archeologists, on the other hand, believe they served as funerary urns, though much remains unknown about their purpose, about how they were moved into place, and about the civilization that produced them. Recent research dates at least some of the stone jars to as early as 1240 B.C., which would make them far older than the human remains buried nearby. Complicating matters is that many of the jars stand in fields of unexploded munitions, the vestige of a massive U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War, and therefore cannot be safely studied. 3. Guanabara Bay During his trial, Kidd wrote a letter claiming he pilfered around 100,000 British pounds and buried it somewhere, offering to trade the location for his life, according to Reuters. However, during the trial it was estimated that the takings from all his time aboard the Adventure Galley likely totaled closer to 400,000 pounds. To his dying breath, Kidd argued he was a legitimate privateer who had only ever plundered targets approved by the crown. But he was hung and his body covered with pitch and squeezed in an iron cage displayed over the Thames. Some secrets are harder to put out of our minds than others. Slepian and his colleagues James Kirby, PhD, at the University of Queensland, and Elise Kalokerinos, PhD, now at the University of Melbourne, explored the negative emotions that often surround secrecy. They surveyed a diverse sample of 1,000 people on Mechanical Turk about more than 6,000 of their secrets and found that people dwelled more on secrets that made them feel ashamed than on those that made them feel guilty ( Emotion, Vol. 20, No. 2, 2020). “Shame, but not guilt, is associated with ruminating on secrets,” Slepian says.

The earliest surviving gospels date to the second century, almost 100 years after the life of Jesus. Slepian’s next goals include using his research to design possible interventions to help people unburden themselves to improve their well-being. The Georgia Guidestones, sometimes referred to as the "American Stonehenge," is a granite monument erected in Elbert County, Georgia, in 1979. The stones are engraved in eight languages — English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Russian — each relaying 10 "new" commandments for "an Age of Reason." The stones also line up with certain astronomical features. Although new research will provide more insight, scholars think it's unlikely they will ever fully know what Jesus was really like. People are fascinated by origins, people are fascinated by mysteries,” says Andrea M. Berlin, a professor of archeology at Boston University. “We’re very curious about what we can’t see, about what came before.”The story of King Arthur has been told and retold numerous times over more than 1,000 years. Camelot, the knights of the round table, the wizard Merlin and the sword Excalibur are all famous parts of the Arthurian tales. The Holy Grail is a chalice that Jesus and his disciples supposedly drank from at the Last Supper. Interest in this cup only emerged during the Middle Ages, at which point various legends about its powers emerged. (Image credit: zemarinho via Getty Images) Some of his ongoing research, for example, is exploring the effects of having to keep secrets on behalf of an employer. Early results suggest that work secrets, like personal secrets, can be both good and bad. On the one hand, it can feel good to be entrusted with important information about one’s company. On the other, keeping that secret can feel like a burden. The bad news is that when people share their secrets with us, we feel like we have to guard them. The more people are preoccupied by that secret, or feel they have to hide it on behalf of the confidant, the more burdensome it is,” he says.

It’s hard for people to get those secrets off their minds. The same paper showed that people’s minds wander to their secrets far more often than they actively try to conceal their secrets from others. And although the frequency of concealment didn’t seem to have much effect on well-being, the more people’s minds wandered to their secrets, the worse off they were. Secrets are a universal human phenomenon. Almost everyone has something to hide (though, of course, not all secrets are of the deep, dark variety). Yet until recently, psychological scientists hadn’t spent much time exploring how keeping secrets affects us. Slepian got his start studying secrets indirectly. He had been researching metaphor—looking at the ways people use language about physical experiences to describe abstract concepts—and he became intrigued by the metaphor of being “weighed down” by a secret. “I wondered if it was just a linguistic thing that people do, or if it reflected something deeper,” he says. The Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus drank from at his last supper with his disciples before his crucifixion, has never been found and almost certainly never will be. In fact, it wasn’t until the Middle Ages that there was much interest in it, after those writing some of the King Arthur stories described the search for the Holy Grail as a quest that King Arthur and his knights took on.Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa went missing in 1975. The FBI is once again on the hunt for his body in a former New jersey landfill. (Image credit: Getty Images) President John F. Kennedy riding in the presidential motorcade near Dealey Plaza in Dallas just before he was shot. (Image credit: Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Ehman wrote the words "Wow!" on the original printout of the signal, thus its title as the "Wow! Signal." On the bright side, those shared confidences can be a boon to bonding, he’s found ( Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 78, 2018). “When people confide in us, we take it as an act of intimacy that can bring us closer,” he adds.

This illustration, "Captain William Kidd in New York Harbour, 1696," by Jean Leone Gerome Ferris, shows the infamous Scottish privateer charming women onboard his ship, the Adventure Galley. (Image credit: PhotoQuest/Getty) We all keep the same kinds of secrets,” Slepian says. “About 97% of people have a secret in at least one of those categories, and the average person is currently keeping secrets in 13 of those categories.” While shame and guilt are both negative emotions, they have important differences, he says. “Guilt is more adaptive. When you feel guilty, you can make amends or decide to do something differently next time,” he explains. “Shame is more about feeling like a bad person. It can make you feel helpless or powerless.” And those feelings of helplessness can lead a person to revisit their shameful secrets over and over.This 75 -hectare of fine greenery is known to be one of the world’s greatest botanical gardens. Visitors often visit this botanical garden with some thirty thematic gardens and 10 exhibition greenhouses. This place is surely for all the nature lovers who enjoys a day to be one with nature. In an extension of that work, he’s beginning to explore how to reduce shame around secrets. “We know the secrets people feel ashamed of hurt them the most. So how can we reduce the shame? Talking to another person might make all the difference,” he says. The burden of secrecy Ancient writers describe a fantastic series of gardens constructed at the ancient city of Babylon in modern-day Iraq. It's not clear when these gardens were built, but some ancient writers were so impressed by the gardens that they called them a "wonder of the world." Around 250 B.C., Philo of Byzantium wrote that the Hanging Gardens had "plants cultivated at a height above ground level, and the roots of the trees are embedded in an upper terrace rather than in the earth."