Read Patton Oswalt’s “Closed Letter to Myself About Thievery, Heckling and Rape Jokes”
Just as essential for those of you who aren’t comedians to read as it is for those of you who are in the trade.
Window Socket - Kyuho Song & Boa Oh
So this is an absolutley brilliant idea! Just attach the plug on to a window and it will harness solar energy. A small converter will convert it into electricity which can be freely used as a plug when you are in the car, on a plane or outside.
Love this design and I really think it has a great potential.via timgspears:
That’s just pretty smart.
A dazzling light show over Crater Lake, an ancient volcanic caldera in Oregon captured by Brad Goldpaint.
Goldpaint on his series:
I drove to Crater Lake National Park on the night of May 31, 2013 to photograph the Milky Way rising above the rim. I’ve waited months for the roads to open and spring storms to pass, so I could spend a solitude night with the stars. Near 11pm, I was staring upward towards a clear night sky when suddenly, without warning, an unmistakable faint glow of the aurora borealis began erupting in front of me. I quickly packed up my gear, hiked down to my truck, and sped to a north facing location. With adrenaline pumping, I raced to the edge of the caldera, set up a time-lapse sequence, and watched the northern lights dance until sunrise. The moon rose around 2am and blanketed the surrounding landscape with a faint glow, adding depth and texture to the shot. The last image in the sequence above shows the route of the International Space Station (ISS) which flew over at 2:35am.
Watch the video on the biggest screen you’ve got for some serious goosebumps:
The Man with the 30 Second Memory
Henry Molaison after his high-school graduation.
In 1953 Henry Molaison, a sufferer of severe epilepsy, underwent experimental brain surgery that saved his life and robbed him of it at the same time. While the removal of bits of Henry’s brain (the hippocampi and parts of both amygdala) cured his condition, it also left him with a sort of amnesia, the likes of which neuroscience had never seen: every 30 seconds his memory was completely erased. Molaison became the first sacrificial martyr in the study of human memory. Although as a subject he was responsible for 60 years of breakthroughs in neuroscience, as a person he was reduced to clawing at facts that swirled round his conscious. After his father passed away, he carried a note in his pocket that read “Dad’s dead.”
Dr. Suzanne Corkin met Henry in 1962 when she was only a med school graduate. Having become his lead investigator in 1982, she spent the next 46 years of her life working with him. I gave Dr. Corkin a call to try to understand what not being able to remember a parent’s death must feel like.
VICE: Hi Dr. Corkin. In your book, Permanent Present Tense, you make a beautiful analogy which to me sums up Henry’s condition sublimely. You write that “information collects in the hotel lobby of Henry’s brain but can’t check into any of the rooms.” Could you expand on this for me?
Dr Suzanne Corkin: This is what inspired the title of my book, and that means basically that he was always living in the moment. He couldn’t tell you what he had done earlier that day, or the day before, or the month before. Once you distracted him, he couldn’t remember what he’d just been talking to you about.I’m gonna try an analogy myself: It sounds like the closest experience we would have to Henry’s condition would be walking into a room and immediately forgetting our reason for doing so. Was this a constant frustration for Henry?
Well, he got used to that. He lived in very familiar surroundings after his operation. He lived with his parents and spent a lot of time in that house. So he got used to walking from one room to another without really knowing why. Presumably if he had to go to the bathroom he knew why he walked to the bathroom. He didn’t know where things were kept. He helped with yard work and he didn’t know where the tools were commonly kept.Did he often watch the same films over and over?
Oh sure, he could read the same magazines over and over too.
Sou Fujimoto’s insane structure for this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, London 2013. Via, photos (C) Iwan Baan.
Scientists say quantum computers could be built to operate up to a million times faster than conventional computers. But how do they work? And how close are we to putting them in homes and offices around the world?Here’s an interactive explanation.
“Now, for the first time in its billions of years of history, our planet is protected by far-seeing sentinels, able to anticipate danger from the distant future–a comet on a collision course, or global warming–and devise schemes for doing something about it. The planet has finally grown its own nervous system: us.”
- Daniel Dennett (We Earth Neurons)
