January 2012
5 posts
2 tags
2 tags
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December 2011
6 posts
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
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November 2011
7 posts
4 tags
“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star....”
– Haruki Murakami (via cyrtenes)
2 tags
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“She thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those...”
– Emma, Jane Austen (via fleurishes)
3 tags
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trumspringa
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. the temptation to step off your career track and become a shepherd in the mountains, following your flock between pastures with a sheepdog and a rifle, watching storms at dusk from the doorway of a small cabin, just the kind of hypnotic diversion that allows your thoughts to make a break for it and wander back to their cubicles in the city.
2 tags
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“A multitude of problems arise from couching these situations in catastrophic and...”
– Tim Cushing
via “The Non-Existant ‘Cyber War’ Is Nothing More Than A Push For More Government Control”
October 2011
3 posts
1 tag
4 tags
September 2011
7 posts
2 tags
5 tags
“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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RIP Troy Davis
3 tags
6 tags
In Honor of Teachers - NYTimes.com →
Scapegoating teachers strikes me as a diversionary tactic, as a distraction from the glut of out-of-school factors (and the associated failing societal institutions) that interfere with learning.
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Since it’s back-to-school season across the country, I wanted to celebrate a group that is often maligned: teachers. Like so many others, it was a teacher who changed the...
2 tags
August 2011
11 posts
3 tags
7 tags
“If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.”
– Fred Menger
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“She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there, leaning on the...”
– J.D. Salinger
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the lump in my throat is starting to feel like a tumor
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Mona Lisa – 6,239 dot to dot drawing →
Thomas Pavitte wanted to create the most complex dot-to-dot drawing, so he made a 6,239 dot to dot Mona Lisa drawing. It took him 9 hours and 15 minutes to connect all the dots on the A0 poster.
6 tags
"Y" by Leslie Adrienne Miller
Perhaps it’s a thread that needs to be pulled, a single stitch caught in the crux.
Whole word in French and Spanish, vertical axis of Cartesian three
loaning its fragile branch to a boy in theory. On y va. Let’s go There.
What happens to unrepaired sequences in subsequent generations? Semivowel,
blown umbrella, arrow reversed in wind, frizzy blot of genetic code directing...
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[1105.0183] Shape Dynamics. An Introduction →
By Julian Barbour:
Shape dynamics is a completely background-independent universal framework of dynamical theories from which all absolute elements have been eliminated. For particles, only the variables that describe the shapes of the instantaneous particle configurations are dynamical. In the case of Riemannian three-geometries, the only dynamical variables are the parts of the metric that...
July 2011
13 posts
5 tags
"Love and Tensor Algebra" by Stanislaw Lem
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go...
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Judges: Death Penalty Used for Re-Election? →
By Sherrilyn A. Ifill:
While most of the country was riveted by the verdict in the Casey Anthony case — invoking the O.J. trial and decrying what many regarded as an unjust verdict — the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit criminal-defense and civil rights law and advocacy firm, released yet another in a series of reports that clearly demonstrate that the...
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“The invariable refrain… is that social issues don’t matter and both...”
– Ben Adler
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NASA’s Stillsuit: Atlantis Crew to Test... →
By Dave Mosher
CAPE CANAVERAL — A textbook-sized kit that can convert urine into drinkable water will accompany NASA’s last space shuttle mission this Friday.
Soldiers already use similar technology to filter out parasites, bacteria, viruses and other contaminants from dirty fluids, including urine, but NASA’s adapted baggie system has yet to prove itself in space.
...
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Dear Virgin Mobile Live,
“FreeFest” is a misnomer. A truly free event would ONLY have free tickets, rather than a limited quantity of freebies and then (apparently) plenty of non-free ‘alternatives’. Your so-called “FreeFest” is a dishonest marketing gimmick. And I am not just saying this because I am bitter, though I am definitely bitter.
Sincerely,
...
7 tags
seophoria
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. the satisfaction of lists, a series of bullet points being fired into the air as if to celebrate victory against the complexity of a universe that bombards us with five exabytes of data that would paralyze us if we didn’t connect random dots into constellations of dippers, hunters, and sexy ways to please your man.
4 tags
Poor countries set to benefit from patent... →
By Sarah Boseley:
Medicines Patent Pool agreement with Gilead Sciences allows Indian generics companies to make cheap copies of some of the best Aids drugs
People with HIV in poor countries have a real prospect of obtaining not just the basic, cheap drugs to keep the virus at bay, but some of the best medicines that are on offer anywhere in the world - at a price their governments can...
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“We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar...”
– Marcel Proust
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Power from the air: Device captures ambient... →
Researchers have discovered a way to capture and harness energy transmitted by such sources as radio and television transmitters, cell phone networks and satellite communications systems. By scavenging this ambient energy from the air around us, the technique could provide a new way to power networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.
IMAGE: Georgia Tech...
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“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”
– Emile M. Cioran
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Researchers develop lens-free, pinhead-size camera →
By Anne Ju:
It’s like a Brownie camera for the digital age: The microscopic device fits on the head of a pin, contains no lenses or moving parts, costs pennies to make — and this Cornell-developed camera could revolutionize an array of science from surgery to robotics.
The camera was invented in the lab of Alyosha Molnar, assistant professor of electrical and computer...