(Source: leilockheart)
Posted 1 week ago
Posted 1 week ago
Posted 2 weeks ago
My neighbor just yelled to one of his buddies “How many ounces are in a quart?”
His friend didnt know.
I yelled down from my window “32 ounces!” and then hid.
He looked around and then yelled out “Thank you female God!”
Posted 2 weeks ago
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
There is something about holding an organized pile of wood pulp and dried ink that gives the reader a shared stake in the author’s experience, some small part-ownership of a piece of information. “This is mine, and although the words in it are not, the experience is purely personal.”
Where will this take us with e-books? I am a huge fan of their accessibility and their rich creative potential, but will the magic persist?
(via Brain Pickings)
Posted 2 weeks ago
Tom Stafford takes a crack at that age-old question: Do we all see colors the same way? He makes sure to add in plenty of good biology, though, from the photoreceptors to the cortex.
Imagine the two of us, arm in arm, looking at a sunset, where the horizon is fretted with golden fire and the deep blue night encroaches from the opposite side of the sky. “What beautiful colours”, I say, and you agree.
And then, in the space of the following silence, I am struck by a worry. I can point at the sky and say it is blue, and you will concur. But are youreally seeing that blue the way I am seeing it? Perhaps you have just learnt to call what you see “blue”, but in actual experience you are seeing nothing like the vivid, rich, blue I see. You are an imposter, calling my blue by the same name as yours, but not really seeing it the way I do. Or, even worse, perhaps I am the one seeing a pale imitation blue, while you see a blue that is infinitely richer and more splendid than mine.
(via BBC - Future)
Posted 2 weeks ago
