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I made a web tool that lets you do that.

“I put in a couple dozen Emily Dickinson poems, and the result is just delightfully surreal …“

In 2009, mechanical engineer Donald Scruggs received a patent for a hermetically sealed coffin that can be screwed into the ground. David Friedman made a short documentary about Scruggs and his screw-in coffin.

#screw it #down doobie do down down

English astronomer and physicist James Jeans’ 1931 essay “Why the Sky is Blue” has become a classic of concise expository writing since it was first published in a series of talks.

“In only four paragraphs and one strikingly detailed, yet simple analogy, Jeans gave millions of students a grasp of celestial blueness in prose that does not substitute nature’s poetry for scientific jargon and diagrams.“

#why is the sky blue #i like it like that

"Every moment of your life, your brain is rewiring. You’ve got 86 billion neurons and a fraction of a quadrillion connections between them. These vast seas of connections are constantly changing their strength, and they’re unconnecting and reconnecting elsewhere. It’s why you are a slightly different person than you were a week ago or a year ago. When you learned that my name is David, there’s a physical change in the structure of your brain. That’s what it means to remember something."

... ‘cause I’m a million different people from one day to the next...

#elastic #brain #the more you know

Normally associated with rot and decay, fungi may be a great overlooked resource that could help humanity deal with some of its greatest problems.

Fluorescents have fascinated artists for millennia, but the 1960s and '70s saw a generation of revolutionaries experiment with black light.

#black light #black light poster

What if major elections, wars and events had turned out differently? Samuel Arbesman explores the detail and delights of maps that plot alternative worlds to our own.

“History is far from a linear path of progress or a tidy series of seminal dates to be memorised. It is messy: it involves small changes resulting in big differences, and many changes that simply might not matter that much at all. During times of tumult like the events of 2020, it can be difficult to see through all the complexity to predict what will actually mean a different world for us, or when a trivial change is simply that: trivial. Nevertheless, in the absence of clarity, we can always take delight in maps from worlds that never were.”

* Samuel Arbesman is scientist in residence at Lux Capital and the author of “The Half-Life of Facts”, and “Overcomplicated”.

#maps #alternate history

Brain “plasticity” is one of the great discoveries in modern science, but neuroscientist David Eagleman thinks the word is misleading.…

“The magic of the brain is that it doesn’t care where the data come from because everything inside the brain is represented by little electrochemical spikes running around. Every neuron in your head is popping off between 10 and hundreds of times per second. The brain doesn’t know if the data come from photons or air compression waves picked up by the ears or mixtures of molecules picked up by the nose and the mouth. It just figures out how to establish feedback loops to send commands to muscles that change the input in particular ways. That’s how I learn the world.“

#brain #neurons #data #experience

A better way to think about the meaning of life.

#drip #pour over #filtered #input #steak lunches rule #espresso

The ship from Moby Dick was a fairly accurate portrayal of the multi-racial character of American whaling crews before the Civil War.

#whales #history #whaling #voyage #melville #society

“I thought: I have to get smarter about this. Who knows about addiction? What addiction has been studied in-depth, for decades, with an absolutely massive group of experiment subjects, to establish the best-practice methods?

Cigarettes!

Valentine tried three main methods to kick her phone addiction habit: substitution, urge-surfing, and following the techniques in Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking.

Carr’s advice was the most effective: Carr notes that there is a huge disconnect between what we want and what we actually enjoy. They’re different neurological processes. “

#outsmart yourself #different processes #your brain on #phone addiction #humans

Here are the 50 ideas that changed my life. These are my guiding principles and the light of my intellectual life. All of them will help you think better, and I hope they inspire curiosity. 1. Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How

23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

24. Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.

#guidelines #avoid stupidity #simple #foundation

From January to the end of June, over 500,000 people died of confirmed cases of Covid-19. In order to demonstrate the magnitude of the pandemic, James Beckwith made a time lapse map of each Covid-19 death.

#COVID-19 #magnitude #soul crushing #earth #humans

A recent workshop hosted by Street Art Belgrade paired up members of the Serbian collective Paint Kartel with seniors interested in the public art form. Throughout the interactive event, participants learned about graffiti and its history, in addition to some practical tips for creating their own largely spray-painted works.

#street art #seniors #graffiti #graffittiart #express yourself #Belgrade #paint kartel

They’re not cuddly, they don’t behave at all like us – yet they are sentient. Why fish belong in the moral community

“However, there are also explicit cognitive factors that influence the moral status we assign animals. Sentience is the most important. By this I mean the minimal capacity to have a direct subjective experience of the qualities associated with sensations and accompanying affectual states. More simply put, sentience is the ability to have the feel of a sensory experience. Because of this, sentient beings have the capacity to suffer, and it is this ability that intuitively affects their moral status. “

#fish #behavior #mirror #sentience #feelings

“To honor essential workers, Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, who goes by Vhils (previously), recently completed an expansive public artwork at the São João University Hospital Centre in Porto. Vhils chiseled 10 masked figures into an outdoor wall at the facility, creating a permanent homage to nurses, doctors, cleaning staff, maintenance workers, and kitchen employees. “It is a commendation of the courage, dedication, and selflessness with which they place their lives at risk in the defense of our own,” the artist says. “The disposition of the people in the composition, side-by-side, aims to symbolize not only the concept of frontline but also cooperation and teamwork.”“

#this #teamwork #masks #healthcare workers #all of us #selfless #thank you

“23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.“

#good advice #trim the load

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