Does Time Exist?
Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.”
Thank God I’m not hot.
In her high school track and field career, Stokke had won a 2004 California state pole vaulting title, broken five national records and earned a scholarship to the University of California, yet only track devotees had noticed. Then, in early May, she received e-mails from friends who warned that a year-old picture of Stokke idly adjusting her hair at a track meet in New York had been plastered across the Internet. She had more than 1,000 new messages on her MySpace page. A three-minute video of Stokke standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times.
3 Billion Songs Sold
The world’s most popular online music, TV, and movie store, iTunes features a catalog of more than five million songs, 550 TV shows, and 500 movies, and it recently surpassed both Amazon and Target to become the third largest music retailer in the US.
(link)
Note: They got to 1 billion on February 22nd, 2006, shy of three years after they launched; then reached the 2 billion mark by January 9th, 2007.
Not Sure What to Say About This
Don’t know if my crappy picture will show well enough the tag line: The Church on the Cutting Edge of Christianity. I was in Northeast Arkansas this past weekend to attend my nephew’s wedding. This is the sign for the church his bride attends where the ceremony took place. I snuck back on Sunday morning to take this photo, though I was too ‘chicken’ to actually get out of the car and walk up to where I might have gotten a clearer photo. (I stopped the car on the shoulder of the highway just to the side.)
In retrospect, I probably should have attended service here on that morning to see what The Cutting Edge actually is, instead of driving around Pocahontas and snapping photos of things past and gone of what I hold in memory of my time here (ages 17 through 27).
At the root of it? Perhaps I’m less journalist and more chicken-shit observer. I never claimed to be the former, nor do I have much background in the profession, and am just now owning up to my own piece as the latter. Interestingly, at the wedding all the music was taped, and all secular, pop and country. (I am intrigued further why the scroll part of the sign chose to show what it shows at the moment I snapped the photo. What’s that about?
Peace, y’all. It’ll come not a minute too soon.
US Border Fences ‘An Eco-Danger’
Mexico has urged the US to alter its plans for expanded fences along their shared border, saying they would damage the environment and harm wildlife.
The fences threaten unique ecosystems, Mexican environment officials warned.
Mexico was ready to file a complaint with the International Court of Justice over the matter if the US did not respond, the environment minister said.
(Link)
Lord of the Rings Tourism Research Project
This is the project website for my PhD [writes Danielle Smith], “Between mythos and logos: film and tourism in the (post)modern landscape”, which explores tourist experiences of landscapes connected with mythical, fictional and legendary narratives and characters.
The Crazification Factor
You realize this leads to there being over 30 million crazy people in the US?
A Picture from Santorini
Sunset in Santorini, Greece viewed from the caldera.
Recollection
Sean Penn and Jack Nicholson were filming a movie together and went to a bar one evening for a drink. In the middle of conversation, a young woman came up to the table and asked Mr. Nicholson if he wanted to dance. He paused, looked up at her, and said, “Wrong verb”.
For Elizabeth Perry (and Kindred Spirits)
When the going gets tough, I invoke Sredni Vashtar.
Hmm, What You Say… (what did you say?)
Despite the warnings over at Say No to Crack, I went ahead and dived right into this parody thunderstorm. And I have the earworm infection today to prove it.
That song! What is with that song? It’s so abrupt, so loud, so…oddly chosen and placed. I looked the song up and it turns out the whole song is pretty long, and the bit they chose is near the end…the entire rest of the song sounded pretty okay for a shooting scene. Why they chose this weird boy-band section is beyond me. But, of course, the choice was made, and it was too ridiculous for the show SNL not to respond with a parody. Warning: violence, and also comedy.
I recommend at the very least viewing the original parody and the final parody Karen recommends, it really does pay off at the end. I had tears of parody laughter in my eyes afterwards.
Peter Bialobrzeski
Lost in the blogosphere, Sven Birkerts
But I am also paranoid enough — or maybe forward-looking enough — to imagine the day when magazines and newspapers have begun to dwindle away and the world of text has shifted dominantly to screen. Indeed, I would say we are right now at what feels like a point of vital balance, and those of us involved with literary journalism and book-reviewing live with the sense of a balance teetering.
Minding the Mind
In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee. …That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
Math Athletics
Alexis Lemaire has broken the record for finding the 13th root of a 200-digit number. It’s an incredibly hard calculation so how does the “human calculator” do it?
Too Cute
(via ze)
Tolstoy’s Monkeys
In sum, monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels: stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are a social impediment) but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families. The two rules interact in interesting ways. For members of high-ranking matrilines, the rules of kin-based and rank-based attraction reinforce one another, whereas for the members of low-ranking families they counteract. A member of a high-ranking matriline is attracted to her kin not only because they are members of the same family but also because they are high-ranking. A member of a low-ranking family may be attracted to her kin, but she is also drawn away from them by her attraction to unrelated, higher-status individuals. As a result, high-ranking families are often more cohesive than lower-ranking ones. Or, to paraphrase Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, all high-ranking families are alike in their cohesiveness, each low-ranking family is cohesive or not, in its own way.
Design proposal for the U.S.–Mexico barrier expansion
type the sky
Type the Sky was born from an instance of sky gazing in the middle of Barcelona from the narrow streets in between several buildings.
(via Slanted via blog.FABRICA)
Parkour
When I saw this video for the first time, I got a weird light panic in my chest. This is the same feeling I had when I saw Bloodsport for the first time, or Top Gun, or the Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings. I really wanted to do parkour. But instead I went back to the email I was writing for work, went home and made dinner, went to sleep at a decent hour, and stayed firmly mortal.
full moon last night
Enjoy
Going down the tubes
Federal agents searched the home of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens on Monday, focusing on records related to his relationship with an oil field services contractor jailed in a public corruption investigation, a law enforcement official said.
(link)
Generation Chickenhawk: With The College Republicans
generating electricity from crowds
MIT grad students are designing a system to convert the mechanical energy of people moving around a building into electricity. Designed for a railways system, Tad Jusczyk and James Graham’s “Crowd Farm” would consist of sub-floor that moves slightly as people walk across it. That motion would then be converted by a dynamo into current.