"What you call the external world is as much you as your own body." – Alan Watts

"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
–Carl Sagan

they're like ninjas

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Krinshnamurti

Most of what we feed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals—most of it is burned off, simply keeping the animals alive until they're slaughtered.

It's bizarre, really: You take a crop like soybeans, oats, corn, or wheat, which are all high in protein, fiber, and complex carbohydrates but devoid of cholesterol and artery-clogging saturated fat. You feed them to an animal and create a product with no fiber or complex carbohydrates at all but with lots of cholesterol and saturated fat. It makes about as much sense as taking pure water, running it through a sewer system, and then drinking it.

Vegetarianism in a Nutshell: Environment

"Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose." - John Adams

Vimeo | Happy Machine by Masaaki Yuasa | Genius Party

I'm sucking up your I.Q., vacuuming your cortex, feeding off your brain!

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are 'da' and 'ja', in some order. You do not know which word means which.

Wikipedia | The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever

“I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results.” - Alfred Nobel

The camera was developed by Harold Edgerton in the 1940s and was first used to photograph the rapidly-changing matter in nuclear explosions within milliseconds of ignition.
Rapatronic Photography

it evolved!

If there is a pygmy jerboa, there must be a regular jerboa...


RUN AWAY

Jerboa

"Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good." - Kierkegaard

The Wow! signal was a strong, narrowband radio signal detected by Dr. Jerry R. Ehman on August 15, 1977, while working on a SETI project at the Big Ear radio telescope of the Ohio State University. The signal bore expected hallmarks of potential non-terrestrial and non-solar system origin. It lasted for 72 seconds, the full duration Big Ear observed it, but has not been detected again. It has been the focus of attention in the mainstream media when talking about SETI results.
Amazed at how closely the signal matched the expected signature of an interstellar signal in the antenna used, Ehman circled the signal on the computer printout and wrote the comment "Wow!" on its side. This comment became the name of the signal.

Wikipedia | Wow! Signal

when there's a place you gotta go, i'm the one you need to know

The most remote inhabited community on Earth. [Zoom out]

beep boop boop

In the 1960s the U.S. Navy set up an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, around the globe to track Soviet submarines. The network was known as SOSUS, short for Sound Surveillance System.
The listening stations lie hundreds of yards below the ocean surface, at a depth where sound waves become trapped in a layer of water known as the "deep sound channel."

The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low frequency underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration several times during the summer of 1997. The source of the sound remains unknown.[...]
According to scientists who have studied the phenomenon it matches the audio profile of a living creature but there is no known animal that could have produced the sound. If it is an animal, it would have to be, reportedly, much larger than even a Blue Whale, the largest known animal on the earth.

List of Cryptids | Bloop | Listen

The title track from Dntel's 2001 album Life Is Full of Possibilities repeats a sample of the Bloop sound set to music.

image: Above

Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself

Quote: Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

at what point did you stop chasing your dreams?

Drawing upon the full archive of Erwin Blumenfeld’s unseen film work, film-maker Adam Mufti and sound designer Olivier Alary have collaborated with SHOWstudio to create three, exclusive edits that focus on three discrete areas of Blumenfeld’s visionary motion image-making: Advertising & Layout, Surrealism & Process and Abstraction & Distortion.

Experiments in Advertising: Unseen Films

AP literature exam is tomorrow

a lesson in style:

"Collections of frontier lore.  Antebellum homes with iron-trellis balconies and hand-worked stairs, the kind down which movie ladies with sun-kissed shoulders run in rich Technicolor, holding up the fronts of their flounced skirts with both little hands in that special way, and the devoted Negress shaking her head on the upper landing.  The Menninger Foundation, a psuchiatric clinic, just for the heck of it.  A patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping white flies.  Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo.  Distant mountains.  Near mountains.  More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhavited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, "too prehistoric for words (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, thier heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountains with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot."

-Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

image by phil elvrum

it's not who you know, it's whom you know

Georges Lemaître:  Catholic priest, scientist, father of the Big Bang Theory.

"Anyone who starts by doubting details will end by doubting life itself." - Milan Kundera