“Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points… And nonetheless the other person is absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living, but… you see perfection in imperfection itself, and that’s how we should learn to love the world.”
, a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis.
A walking human gets about 75 MPG (miles of travel per gallon of food energy). A biking human? Even better, at 290 MPG.
But when you factor in all the fossil fuels that go into making that food, we only get 18 MPG walking and 70 MPG on a bike. Check out the full rundown of the energetic calculations at Do The Math.
(via npr)
A cluster of a special type of nerve cells called cerebellar granule cells, growing in culture. These cells naturally gather together, and when placed in a culture dish covered in a particular protein, they start sending out long projections (yellow/green) as they would in the developing brain. Fluorescence microscopy.
“The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary;”
, a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.
Yes, athletes, musicians, drivers and chess players, when they are in the flow, can act fast without needing to make decisions about what to do. But this is not because they aren’t thinking. Nor is it because they are thinking really fast. It’s because they are thinking about what matters, such as the musical ideas or the traffic or the potential vulnerability of the King to attack. Mastery consists precisely in shifting attention from the mechanics of a task to, if you like, the task’s point. Nothing illustrates this better than the case of language itself. We learn to decline and conjugate so that we can talk. The learner of a second language needs to give painstaking attention to grammatical choices and rules. But conversation — thoughtful participation in the parry and thrust, the give and take — requires that we stop focusing on the grammar and start focusing on what we are doing. What is required is not that we become automata, or forget the grammar; what is required is that we become masters of it. (via The Zombie Within : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR)
The austerity survival guide. “In the event of economic collapse…”
via the NYT
Wesley Keil, “Baltimore”
