Life with purpose

The crucial point of all this is that agency – like consciousness, and indeed life itself – isn’t just something you can perceive by squinting at the fine details. Nor is it some second-order effect, with particles behaving ‘as if’ they’re agents, perhaps even conscious agents, when enough of them get together. Agents are genuine causes in their own right, and don’t deserve to be relegated to scare quotes. Those who object can do so only because we’ve so far failed to find adequate theories to explain how agency comes about. But maybe that’s just because we’ve failed to seek them in the right places – until now.

by (https://aeon.co/essays/the-biological-research-putting-purpose-back-into-life)

Radiating from the pages is also the welcome disorientation of time travel, deconditioning our habit of mistaking today’s culturally constructed commonplaces for ahistorical givens: Blackwell’s bright-red tomato blazes the reminder that this plant — so common today as to be commonplace the world over — was then an exotic native of the New World, known in the Old World as love-apple.

by https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/01/29/elizabeth-blackwell-curious-herbal/?mc_cid=8f54bc6cad&mc_eid=d361d399e1

Народна Република България от 1944 г. до 1989 г. в цифри и факти

Социалистическа Народна Република България от 1944 г. до 1989 г само цифри и факти. Живота от 1944 до 1989 който загубихме и това което "спечелихме" от 1989 до днес. Четете и разказвайте за да знаят хората истинската си история.... За периода 1979-1988 г. САЩ увеличава БВП на глава от населението със 182%, Япония с 275%, Германия със 158%, Франция със 157%, а България увеличава БВП на глава от населението с 234%. Това ще рече, че България по време на комунизма, дори и в годините на Перестройка, никога не е била в рецесия, камо ли фалирала, както поучава западната пропаганда.

by (http://www.bgspomen.com/2016/05/1944-1989.html)

The 12 days of Pascal’s triangular Christmas

One of the most magical aspects of mathematics is the ability for complex and intricate structures to emerge from the simplest of rules. Few mathematical objects are simpler to create – and few weave such a variety of intricate patterns – as Pascal’s marvelous triangle.

by https://theconversation.com/the-12-days-of-pascals-triangular-christmas-21479 Also see A Triangle Calculator

Century of Global Warming

Created by Antti Lipponen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the video uses temperature anomaly data from NASA to show that despite year-to-year variations, communities across the globe are experiencing significantly warmer temperatures since the early 20th century, reported Vox.

by (http://e360.yale.edu/digest/new-video-visualizes-a-century-of-global-warming-in-just-35-seconds)

All You Need Is Love

Loren Carpenter Experiment at SIGGRAPH ‘91

Loren Carpenter Experiment at SIGGRAPH '91 from Zachary Murray on Vimeo.

Loren Carpenter presents an experiment at SIGGRAPH 1991 by projecting a game of Pong. The game is controlled by paddles distributed to an audience, which spontaneously organizes itself to play the game.

by (https://vimeo.com/78043173)

Programming language for novel biological circuits

"It is literally a programming language for bacteria," says Christopher Voigt, an MIT professor of biological engineering. "You use a text-based language, just like you're programming a computer. Then you take that text and you compile it and it turns it into a DNA sequence that you put into the cell, and the circuit runs inside the cell."

by (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160331154001.htm)

Чёрно-белые художественные фотографии Алекса Хоуита

Алекс Хоуит (Alex Howit) – британский художник и фотограф, проживающий в Лондоне. Он автор классических чёрно-белых, размытых художественных, уличных и ню фотографий, с которыми мы вас сегодня знакомим.

by (http://cameralabs.org/7932-chjorno-belye-khudozhestvennye-fotografii-aleksa-khouita)

Vortex

In short, it is fringe theory science-babble wrapped in pretty animation. The majority of those viewers will watch it, accept it and move on. And with 1.4 million views and climbing, the video has spread more misconceptions in a day than I or most other scientists could counter in a year. Pretty noise that overwhelms the signal.

by (https://briankoberlein.com/2014/03/15/signal-noise/)

Classroom portraits by Julian Germain

This ongoing series began in schools in North East England in 2004 and was extended to schools throughout the UK the following year. Since 2005 the archive has grown to include schools from North and South America, Europe and the Middle East.

by (http://fishki.net/1233080-kak-vygljadjat-ucheniki-i-ih-klassy-v-raznyh-stranah.html, http://www.juliangermain.com/projects/classrooms.php)

Europe (timelapse map)

by (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1sjHGODFHg)

Self Portraits

William Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He created a heart-wrenching final series of self-portraits over a roughly 5-year period documenting the gradual decay of his mind due to this crippling illness

by (http://themetapicture.com/man-with-alzheimers-drew-self-portraits-for-5-years-until-he-could-barely-remember-his-own-face/)

Самая чудаковатая форма армий мира

Отправляясь в любую армию мира, человек заранее соглашается подчиняться чужой воле. А заодно и воле дизайнеров, которые придумали для этой армии такую странную форму.

by (http://www.maximonline.ru/photogallery/_article/funny-army/)

Knowledge-based Programming

“The knowledge graph is a vastly less ambitious project than what we’ve been doing at Wolfram Alpha,” he told VentureBeat when we asked him about its relation to Google’ knowledge projects. “Making the world computable is a much higher bar than being able to generate Wikipedia-style information … a very different thing. What we’ve tried to do is insanely more ambitious.”

by (http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/24/knowledge-based-programming-wolfram-releases-first-demo-of-new-language-30-years-in-the-making/, http://reference.wolfram.com/language/)

BitTorrent Serverlerss Chat

BitTorrent wrote. "With Chat, we are expanding on what we can use the DHT for. We have updated our DHT protocol to support encryption. The new DHT protocol enables users to find each other securely and privately."

by Jon Brodkin (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/bittorrent-serverless-chat-replaces-usernames-with-crypto-keys/)

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Cincinnati Waterfront Panorama Daguerreotype

Owned by the Cincinnati Public Library, it is one of the most astounding examples of daguerreotype (the first known photographic method) in existence today. The clarity of each of its eight copper panels is equivalent to a 140,000-megapixel digital image, thousands of times better than high-end commercially available digital cameras today.

by (http://www.rochester.edu/news/photos/daguerreotype.html)

Is hydrogen the car fuel of the future?

Daimler, Honda, Toyota, General Motors and Hyundai among others are committed to putting hydrogen-fuelled fuel-cell cars on limited sale in Europe by 2015 and the recent partnership between leading fuel-cell proponents General Motors and Honda, as well as the similar two-year-old deal between Toyota and BMW shows that car makers, if not analysts and the press, are taking this zero-tail-pipe emissions technology seriously.

by (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/10372670/Is-hydrogen-the-car-fuel-of-the-future.html)

A New Programming Language That Can Shape Our DNA

Scientists have studied the behavior of complex biological molecules such as DNA for decades. Now they are moving to being able to control that behavior in test tubes and inside cells.

by (http://www.fastcoexist.com/3019370/futurist-forum/a-new-programming-language-that-can-shape-our-dna)