the child grows enormous but never grows up

Photo

Fri, 18 May 2012 16:20:39 -0500

touba: The cover of the 7 May 2012 issue of the Journal of...

Fri, 18 May 2012 12:44:36 -0500

The cover of the 7 May 2012 issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, featuring artwork by Lewis Long. Long’s artwork is based on Luk et al.’s findings ”that injection of brain lysate from symptomatic aged mice into the brains of asymptomatic young mice is sufficient to initiate spreading of α-synuclein aggregates and to accelerate the onset of Parkinson’s disease–like symptoms. The original image shows α-synuclein (green) and microtubule-associated protein 2 (red) in the brain of a mouse injected 90 days prior with symptomatic brain lysate.”

nevver: Dairy Queen

Fri, 18 May 2012 10:51:02 -0500

nevver:

Dairy Queen

"Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain,..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 22:08:12 -0500

“Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.”

- W.H. Auden (via brysonian)

It’s as if Auden anticipated the genre of “glib startup advice” blogging.

(via buzz)

Photo

Thu, 17 May 2012 20:16:01 -0500

mythologyofblue: Approaching may be our most profound vocation....

Thu, 17 May 2012 18:22:42 -0500

mythologyofblue:

Approaching may be our most profound vocation. Perhaps we do nothing else in our lifetimes but hedge round, surround things and people with greater or lesser precision, more or less conscientiously, swerving or brushing past them, at most grasping them for a moment, never arriving anywhere for good, except, at the very last, in the earth.

-Daniel Robberechts, Arriving in Avignon, p. 15

[image by Jim Denevan]

Photo

Thu, 17 May 2012 16:33:31 -0500

thescienceofreality: “Just an FYI: Stars in the Universe far...

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:35:00 -0500

thescienceofreality:

“Just an FYI: Stars in the Universe far outnumber all sounds & words ever uttered by all humans who ever lived.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson

A very important thing to remember.

heyoscarwilde: Title Sequence the opening credits from Stanley...

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:38:17 -0500

heyoscarwilde:

Title Sequence

the opening credits from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove :: via depressionpress

"Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:40:01 -0500

“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffuse, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

- George Eliot, Middlemarch (via leopoldgursky)

theatlantic: Abraham Lincoln Did Not Invent Facebook: How a Guy...

Wed, 16 May 2012 22:08:02 -0500

theatlantic:

Abraham Lincoln Did Not Invent Facebook: How a Guy and His Blog Fooled the Whole Wide Internet

The fun/chaos started, as it so often does, with a bad day on Monday. Come the evening of the 7th, St. Pierre says, “I was crabby; I was in a bad mood; I was tired of looking around at all the boring, lame stuff online — all the same people rehashing the same things.” He enjoys writing, so he took to his computer “to write something that would be exciting to read.” He started crafting a sensational story that would tell the tale of the epic day St. Pierre wished he’d just had — revisionist history meets personalized fanfic. “So I thought, ‘Okay, what would be just fun and crazy?’ What if Lincoln invented Facebook?”

Starting with that fun and crazy and also totally false premise, St. Pierre spun the rest of the tale of his alt-universe adventure. He wrote the story in bed, from 9:30 in the evening to 2:30 in the morning, impelled by the catharsis and amused by the absurdity of it all. Lincoln inventing Facebook! So ridiculous!

Really, he says, “I just wanted something that would make me smile.”

Read more. [Image: Brian Fung]

Photo

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:16:17 -0500

how many books do i have to read before people like me?

Wed, 16 May 2012 19:48:57 -0500

how many books do i have to read before people like me?

lowtax: happy not sad, sad not happy plummerfernandez: I’ve set up two twitter bots that follow...

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:22:32 -0500

lowtax:

happy not sad, sad not happy

plummerfernandez:

I’ve set up two twitter bots that follow identical algorithms but will probably evolve to be very different. Both @happyB0T and @sadB0T are learning Markov text generators. Their vocabulary starts from zero but they gradually expand it by searching for tweets and adding them to their own growing dictionary of words and phrases. They then use a Markov chain algorithm to construct new sentences and tweet them.

The difference between the two is that happyB0T only searches for tweets that include :) (happy faces), and sadB0T sadly only collects tweets that include :( (sad faces).

More specifically in code and twitter api search terms…

searchQuery = “:) -:(“; //happy, not sad

searchQuery = “:( -:)”; //sad, not happy

The bots also serve as fragmented mirrors to our cultural and linguistic tendencies. Only time can tell how these two will progress.

A project done in Processing with Twitter4J and RITA libraries.

Note: the ‘0’ in happyB0T and sadB0T is actually a zero 0. (For twitter naming purposes)

Photo

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:31:41 -0500

"If this is the future of the book, then the book is indeed doomed. Writing is a miraculous..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:35:35 -0500

“If this is the future of the book, then the book is indeed doomed. Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations. An equivalent experience does not exist. Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli.”

- n+1: Bones of the Book

sometimesagreatnotion: Winners.

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:34:38 -0500

sometimesagreatnotion:

Winners.

Imma buff baby that can dance like a man. I can shaka my fanny,...

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:40:40 -0500

Imma buff baby that can dance like a man. I can shaka my fanny, I can shaka my can. Imma tough tootin’ baby, I can puncha yo buns, puncha yo buns, I can punch all yo buns. If you’re a evil witch, I will punch you fo fun!

"Documentary vision is kind of like the “camera eye” photographers develop when, after taking many..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 10:50:31 -0500

“Documentary vision is kind of like the “camera eye” photographers develop when, after taking many photos, they begin to see the world as always a potential photo even when not holding the camera at all. The habit of the photographer involuntarily framing and composing the world has become a metaphor for those trained to document using social media. The explosion of ubiquitous self-documentation possibilities, and the audience for our documents that social media promises, has positioned us to live life in the present with the constant awareness of how it will be perceived as having already happened. We come to see what we do as always a potential document, imploding the present with the past, and ultimately making us nostalgic for the here and now.”

- Absolutely fascinating look at the rise of the faux-vintage photograph and the accompanying learned behaviors that are here to stay.

The Faux-Vintage Photo Essays I, II and III
Nathan Jurgeson

(via curiositycounts)

500-1500: sharimcc: So I’m sort of writing a paper, mostly...

Tue, 15 May 2012 22:08:10 -0500

500-1500:

sharimcc:

So I’m sort of writing a paper, mostly drinking iced coffee waiting for something magical to happen. It did! I actually found a mythical “Word Note” written by David Foster Wallace in the Mac OS thesaurus. I could not begin to tell you why I felt compelled to look up “feckless” in a thesaurus.

“The great thing about using feckless is that it lets you be extremely dismissive and mean without sounding mean; you just sound witty and classy.”

i’m full of feck.