What’s it like to experience schizophrenic symptoms? (by ChrisboxDOTcom)

Hans Rosling on global population growth

(via freshphotons)

Derren Brown explains how voodoo works on (most) people. 

ralphewig:

Space History - I found this amazing chart on the MIT Technology Review site. It shows the number of space launches for each country over time, starting with the very first launch ever, to the end of the Space Shuttle era. One thing that immediately struck me was that the often mentioned “US leadership in space flight” people were so worried about losing when the Shuttle retired isn’t as self-evident as some would like to believe.

Actually, the list of nations on that chart is pretty long, and growing every year! Just as all nations share the responsibility of stewardship for planet Earth - and the consequences when any one of them fails in that responsibility - it will take all of humanity’s resources and efforts to make us a multi-planetary society. No matter what flag is on it (although personally I’d prefer it to be none at all), any spaceship that successfully claws its way out of Earth’s gravity is an accomplishment for all of us.

(via openscience)

explodingdog:

I wish I had some chewing gum, maybe I should go out and get some chewing gum.

mdt:

I wish I had enough wall space for the whole solar system…

Beyond Earth: A Poster Series // by: Stephen Di Donato

(via physicsphysics)

I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each person has things they like, but no one’s preferences are any better than anyone else’s. There is no such thing as good taste.

Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be false, and I’m going to try to explain why.

One problem with saying there’s no such thing as good taste is that it also means there’s no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than people who didn’t. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it.

It was pulling on that thread that unravelled my childhood faith in relativism. When you’re trying to make things, taste becomes a practical matter. You have to decide what to do next. Would it make the painting better if I changed that part? If there’s no such thing as better, it doesn’t matter what you do. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you paint at all. You could just go out and buy a ready-made blank canvas. If there’s no such thing as good, that would be just as great an achievement as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Less laborious, certainly, but if you can achieve the same level of performance with less effort, surely that’s more impressive, not less.

Yet that doesn’t seem quite right, does it?

Continue at
 http://www.paulgraham.com/goodart.html

“The very first image of the whole Earth was made in 1966. It was fax quality, sent back by the Lunar Orbit 1. Most remarkable was the ingenious contraption that took a picture, developed the film, scanned it and transmitted it back, all in analog, with mechanical moving parts, in zero gravity and a total vacuum.” - Kevin Kelly