Bad Ideas

The shit that I think of when I'm alone

[yhelmy]

Everything You Need to Know About Dark Energy ... : From Quarks to Quasars

According to scientists, a lot of our universe is composed of Dark energy, an invisible and undetectable force that comprises a staggering 73% of our universe. Here, we explain what it is and how we know it’s out there…http://bit.ly/XwUl7F http://ift.tt/1Bn5U0T

[yhelmy]

“Horses of God”: The real roots of Islamic terrorism

One of the central principles of bigotry is the not-so-secret belief that all members of a despised group are pretty much the same: Black people are disposed to crime and would rather not work, Jews are greedy and grasping, and so on. http://ift.tt/1iUQhFI

[emergentfutures]

The Most Important Economic Chart

The chart shows that productivity, or output per hour of work, has quadrupled since 1947 in the United States. This is a spectacular achievement by an advanced economy.

The gains in productivity were quite widely shared from 1947 to 1980. Real income for the median U.S. family doubled during this time just as output per hour of work performed doubled. The rising tide was lifting all boats.

However, what we want to focus on today is the remarkable separation in productivity and median real income since 1980. While the United States is producing twice as much per hour of work today compared to 1980, a small part of the gain in real income has gone to the bottom half of the income distribution. The gap between productivity and median real income is at an historic all-time high today.

Full Story: House of Debt

[freshphotons]

Cosmic Inflation Explained.

[thedragoninmygarage]

Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis explain why dinosaurs are not mentioned in The Bible. It all makes perfect sense now. How could we all have been so dumb?

[liberatingreality]

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

Stephen Jay Gould

(via liberatingreality)

[mucholderthen]

via Twitter/@IFLScience

[scienceisbeauty]

Look at Albert Einstein working in his Theory of General Relativity in Zurich:

Einstein’s search for general relativity spanned eight years, 1907-1915. Some periods were quiet and some were more intense. The moments when the great transition occurred, came sometime between the late summer of 1912, when Einstein moved from Prague to Zurich, and early 1913.

Source (and context): A Peek into Einstein’s Zurich Notebook, from the absolutely advisable page of Goodies by Professor John D. Norton, (Department of History and Philosophy of Science - University of Pittsburgh), from now in my bookmarks.

[fer1972]

Insect Sculptures made from Junk Stuff by Edouard Martinet

[odditiesoflife]

This 3200 Year Old Tree is So Massive, It’s Never Been Captured in a Single Image…Until Now

It takes a special kind of tree to have a nickname like “The President”. The giant sequoia stands 247 feet tall and is an estimated 3,200 years old. The trunk measures 27 feet across and, between the base and the highest peak, there are an estimated two billion needles.

Until now, the tree had never been photographed in its entirety. A team of photographers from National Geographic worked with scientists from California’s Sequoia National Park to try to be the first.

It took an intricate set of pulleys and levers to scale the tree, which one scientist argues is the largest in the world (if you take into account width). After stitching together 126 separate photos, we are left with this mind-blowing portrait of “The President” captured in a single photo for the first time.

[30000fps]

[noorannmatties]

Selections from ‘Rituals’, by Noorann Matties

Forced to examine ourselves in ways many normally avoid, Rituals as a project sought to capture the moment in which we our lives become devoid of distraction and we become intimately aware of ourselves. By photographing people’s personal beauty rituals I attempted to capture this awareness, this intimacy that occurs only when one is forced to examine their own body, the most basic thing that is theirs, and build upon it.

view the complete series at http://inconnumag.com/rituals/

[wotfigo]

Egyptian population explosion worsens social unrest

iEgypt s struggling to contain a population explosion that has surged in the past three years, exacerbating many of the social tensions that indirectly led to the 2011 uprising.

The number of births in Egypt in 2012 was 560,000 higher...

[spacetravelco]

°⚪ Exoplanets Visualized ⚪°

Exploring our neighborhood with NASA, CERC, blprnt, Open Exoplanet Catalogue, The Kepler Orrery, xkcd, codementum, TULP, Exoplanet Data Explorer, exovis, and the Exoplanet App.

Join the search!

[mathmajik]

Art Forms of Nature

Artforms of Nature

The 19th century German biologist Ernst Haeckel is famous for his fantastically illustrated book Artforms of Nature.

Haekel’s artistic interpretation of the biological forms he studied have a clarity of symmetry and detail that has been a source of inspiration for many artists and engineers over the years. They provide the perfect subject matter for the Fractal Explorer plugin.

Source: sublue.com

[awkwardsituationist]

paul bourke, associate professor at the university of western australia, scours google earth looking for fractal patterns, or self similarity, in the rivers systems, mountains ranges and deserts of the planet. in nature, self similarity doesn’t exist ad infinitum, as with a mandlebrot set, but branching structures are found across two, three, even four scales. paul invites people to submit their finds own to his site, which links to the pictures shown here on google earth (click pics for the country)

(learn more about fractals on “hunting the hidden dimension”, pbs nova)

[socionic]

#fractalfriday #fractalart #fractal #organicmath #artmath @Subblue #TomBeddard #3DFractal #3DArt