The basic thesis is that between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of time — 0.1s — acquired a weirdly powerful role at the heart of science, and indirectly, in the shaping of all modernity.
The tldr of the book might even be: the failure to come to terms with the 0.1s limit in human cognition gave birth to modernity, with all its inherent tensions, via a set of parallel crises.
An ongoing series of vibrant river and delta images from North America and other parts of the world. The images are constructed using high-resolution elevation data. To learn more about the rivers and to download the 4K-resolution versions, use the links at the bottom of the page.
Source: Dan Coe Carto – 4K Rivers
Colossal | Art, design, and visual culture
— Read on www.thisiscolossal.com/2020/01/biodiversity-heritage-library-free-download/
That feeling when the present catches up with your dreams of what the future might bring.
Entomologists call it the windshield phenomenon. “If you talk to people, they have a gut feeling. They remember how insects used to smash on your windscreen,” says Wolfgang Wägele, director of the Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity in Bonn, Germany. Today, drivers spend less time scraping and scrubbing. “I’m a very data-driven person,” says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Oregon. “But it is a visceral reaction when you realize you don’t see that mess anymore.
Just as the bright city lights are vanishing behind us, the Milky Way starts to become clearly visible up ahead. Its now us, pacing at almost the speed of sound along the invisible highway and the pitch-black night sky above this surreal landscape. Ahead of us are another eight hours flight time, but we already stopped counting the shooting stars. And we got already to a few hundred.
Read the full article on Beyond Clouds.
8 Earth years are roughly equal to 13 Venus years, meaning the two planets approximately trace out this pattern with 5-fold symmetry as they orbit the Sun.
Via: iBleeedorange @ Reddit
Should you find yourself in a post apocalyptic wasteland ruled by water-hording warlords, please remember the solar still.
One of the most significant survival tools created in the last 40 years, the solar still was developed by two physicians working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Results of extensive testing in the Arizona deserts by the U.S. Air Force proved that when properly assembled, the still can save your life.
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There are only 2 essential components to constructing the solar still — a container to catch the water and a 6 x 6-footsheet of clear plastic. A shovel or trowel, a length of plastic tube and tape are all optional.
The container can be a collapsible cup, an empty plastic bottle, a small cooking pot or just about anything with a large enough opening to catch falling drops of water. In a pinch, even tin foil or a sandwich bag can be fashioned into a workable receptacle.
The sheet of clear plastic can be a ground cloth used under tents when backpacking or a thin painting drop cloth. Both work well as long as there are no tears or holes. This is the one item that should be carried at all times, since there is no natural substitute out in the boonies. I keep a 6 x 12-foot plastic drop cloth taped inside my daypack, large enough to make two stills if necessary. Some desert rats like to keep their plastic sheets folded inside a hip sack or as part of their first-aid kits.
A 6-foot length of flexible plastic tubing, similar to the kind used in fish tanks is a non-essential but desirable addition to the still components. This will allow you to drink accumulated water without needing to break down the solar still, inevitably affecting its efficiency.
So you like cold drinks, especially in the heat of the summer. You also like large drinks, however, they come at a cost: unless you can drink a superhuman quantity of liquid in a relatively short period of time, your beverage is gonna get warm. This is unacceptable. Enter the “Stein Of Science“. A full metal jacket around a cryostatic dewar with a hefty steel handle.
You know you want one.
When Subject 1’s cup of unadulterated was half empty, he grabbed his water bottle and poured the remainder into his clear glass coffee cup. He looks at it and then puts his hand up because He Needs An Adult. He said with concern, “I added water but it didn’t change color.” We all wandered over to peek into the dark heart of his mug. Even diluted to 50% of the original strength, it is still as black, oily, and potentially lethal as a tar pit.
While accurate, this can’t merely be called Scientific Coffee or even Weapons Grade Coffee. My brain went searching for terms that accurately described this creation. While the tar entity that killed Tasha Yar in ST:TNG came to mind, John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble In Little China” is what stuck. This coffee is the Black Blood Of The Earth (or BBotE for the sake of brevity).
With 145 cups of coffee’s worth of caffeine in 5.7 cups of volume, this is emphatically a beverage not to be trifled with. more importantly, though, it is fantastically delicious. Any comparison to regular coffee is, at best, fraught with peril. This is like comparing apples and bazookas.
Mirror neurons are just the beginning of a whole range of research going on in neuropsychology and brain research and in child development that suggests that we are actually soft-wired not for aggression and violence and self interest and utilitarianism that we are actually soft-wired for sociability ‘attachment’ as John Bowlby might have said affection, companionship, and that the first drive is the drive to actually ‘belong’. It’s an empathic drive.
Empathy is the invisible hand. Empathy is what allows us to stretch our sensibility with another so that we can cohere in larger social units. To empathize is to civilize, to civilize is to empathize.
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