Amira

:-) - Amira

love! - Todd Hoff

"The less punctuation marks, taken in isolation, convey meaning or expression and the more they constitute the opposite pole in language names, the more each of them acquires a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an expression of its own, which cannot be separated from its syntactic function but is by no means exhaused by it. (...) Even text, even the most densely woven, cites them of its own accord -- friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes the body of language. There is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks. The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic cadence. Exclamation points are like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like musical upbeats, colons dominant seventh chords; and only a person who can perceive the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form can really feel the distinction between the comma and the semicolon. (...) - Amira

"Literary dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their products hook sentences together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras. But the dash provides instruction in them. In the dash, thought becomes aware of its fragmentary character. It is no accident that in the era of the progressive degeneration of language, this mark of punctuation is neglected precisely insofar as it fulfills its function: when it separates things that feign a connection. All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising. (...) The test of a writer's sensitivity in punctuating is the way he handles parenthetical material. (...)" - Amira

This is interesting, but it is about written texts (in some modern languages; in many languages/skripts and in ancient languages there are innumerous texts without any punctuation marks, often even without marks that separate words) and script usage, not about language as such. - Maitani

Thoroughly enjoyable. - Goran Zec

"The film focuses on the nature of dreams, consciousness, and existentialism. The title is a reference to philosopher George Santayana’s maxim: “Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.” Waking Life is about an unnamed young man in a persistent dream-like state that eventually progresses to lucidity. He initially observes and later participates in philosophical discussions of issues such as reality, free will, the relationship of the subject with others, and the meaning of life. Along the way the film touches on other topics including existentialism, situationist politics, posthumanity, the film theory of André Bazin, and lucid dreaming itself. By the end, the protagonist feels trapped by his perpetual dream, broken up only by unending false awakenings. His final conversation with a dream character reveals that reality may be only a single instant which the individual consciousness interprets falsely as time (and, thus, life) until a level of understanding is achieved that may allow the individual to break free from the illusion." - Amira

"The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence. The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism. And you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before on the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, noncompetitive grouping. (...) Evolution now becomes an individually centered process, emanating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process where the individual is just at the whim of the collective. (...) The input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as ability piles on ability, the speed changes. (...) It could be the amplification of the individual, the multiplication of individual existences. Parallel existences now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space." - Amira

“We won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). (…) The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 25 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.” — Ray Kurzweil "The Law of Accelerating Returns" http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law... - Amira

Abstract: "The concept of a critical period for visual development early in life during which sensory experience is essential to normal neural development is now well established. However recent evidence suggests that a limited degree of plasticity remains after this period and well into adulthood. Here, we ask the question, "what limits the degree of plasticity in adulthood?" Although this limit has been assumed to be due to neural factors, we show that the optical quality of the retinal image ultimately limits the brain potential for change. We correct the high-order aberrations (HOAs) normally present in the eye's optics using adaptive optics, and reveal a greater degree of neuronal plasticity than previously appreciated." - Amira

Wow! Time for laser eye surgery… - Amit Patel

"Perhaps most important, liberals consistently score higher on a personality measure called “openness to experience,” (...) That means liberals tend to be the kind of people who want to try new things, including new music, books, restaurants and vacation spots — and new ideas. (...) Conservatives, in contrast, tend to be less open — less exploratory, less in need of change — and more “conscientious,” a trait that indicates they appreciate order and structure in their lives. This gels nicely with the standard definition of conservatism as resistance to change. (...) The “need for cognitive closure.” This describes discomfort with uncertainty and a desire to resolve it into a firm belief. Someone with a high need for closure tends to seize on a piece of information that dispels doubt or ambiguity, and then freeze, refusing to consider new information. Those who have this trait can also be expected to spend less time processing information than those who are driven by different motivations, such as achieving accuracy." - Amira

"A number of studies show that conservatives tend to have a greater need for closure than do liberals (...) The trait is assessed based on responses to survey statements such as “I dislike questions which could be answered in many different ways” and “In most social conflicts, I can easily see which side is right and which is wrong.” (…) Anti-evolutionists have been found to score higher on the need for closure. And in the global-warming debate, tea party followers not only strongly deny the science but also tend to say that they “do not need any more information” about the issue. (...) We wield different facts, and hold them close, because we truly experience things differently. (…)” - Amira

sosyalistler ve komunistler adam olmadığı için araştırılmamış - feraye

So, which of the two brains is "impaired" that it blindly ignores measurable facts? - Egon Willighagen

"So what does matter in determining the happiness or life satisfaction in a nation? Income of course matters to everyone, especially the poorest. As the report shows, the richest countries are a lot happier than the poorest. The four happiest are all in Northern Europe (Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands) and the four least happy are in Sub-Saharan Africa. On a 0-10 scale, the average life evaluation score is 7.6 in the first four countries and only 3.4 in the last four. (...) But income is only one among many factors that explain the variation in happiness among people. As the report describes, income explains only about one-twentieth of the variation within nations that can be explained statistically, and across countries it explains about one-eighth of the explained variation. The other factors besides income can be divided into those that are mainly social and those that are mainly personal." - Amira

"Countries differ hugely in the strength of their networks of social support ("If you were in trouble do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them?"). They also differ in the degree of corruption in government and business, and of course in personal freedom and security. All these factors matter a great deal. So too does the state of the labor market. High and stable employment is extremely important. Therein lies the case for active labor market policies, job training, and various innovations in working hours flexibility. Turning to more personal factors, a crucial one is mental health. A person's mental health many years earlier is a better predictor of his current happiness than his current level of income. (...) Physical health is also a major factor affecting happiness. (...) Not surprisingly, individual values are also important. People who care more about other people are also themselves on average happier. (...) Over the last 40 years, sadly, measured happiness has not increased in the United States despite sharply rising incomes. The problems of poverty, insecurity, corruption, loss of social trust, and other factors are weighing heavily on America's sense of well-being. (...)" - Amira

“Probably 99.999 percent of what goes on in the brain is automatic and unconscious. I have no idea what my next sentence will be, and sometimes I sound like it. (…) We think the other stuff, the ‘me,’ the ‘self,’ — we think that’s really important. We think there is somebody in charge —somebody pulling the levers. (…) “The brain is automatic but people are free. You are responsible. Get over it.” Free will is not a useful concept at the level of brain biology, to summarize Gazzaniga, because the biology is fixed. We cannot control our brains. It is at the level of interactions between people where concepts like responsibility and justice can be addressed. Gazzaniga compared the problem to an analysis of traffic, which cannot be achieved by studying individual cars. “Traffic only exists in the interaction,” he said.” - Amira

Q&A featured an outraged tirade by a speaker so apoplectic over Gazzaniga’s claims of the deterministic brain, that he could barely make himself understood. This was balanced by the question of a more modest audience member who had attended a talk given by Eric Kandel, and had also asked Kandel’s counsel about eating "brain food." "What do you advise?" he asked Gazzaniga. "Blueberries and martinis," Gazzaniga answered. "What did Kandel say?" asked Gazzaniga. The man replied, "wine every night and forget about it!" --ibid. :-) - Adriano

"They say silence is golden – but there’s a room in the U.S that’s so quiet it becomes unbearable after a short time. The longest that anyone has survived in the ‘anechoic chamber’ at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is just 45 minutes. It’s 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s quietest place, but stay there too long and you may start hallucinating. (...) ‘In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound.’ (...)" - Amira

Watching "Bang Goes the Theory" S6 ep2 right now and they're using a similar chamber to record the sound of a maggot moving. (EDIT: The snail makes no discernible noise even in such a chamber. Snail = NINJA) - Spidra Webster

"British Library Sounds presents 50,000 recordings and their associated documentation from the Library’s extensive collections of unique sound recordings which come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound: music, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds. The selection available here comes from the 3.5 million sounds held in the British Library." - Amira

"With a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Richard Linklater's Before Sunset, Shakespeare and Company is arguably the most iconic bookshop in the French capital. The building, a 17th century ex-monastery has become a landmark in the 5th arrondissement. Apart from being a bookstore, it also serves as a haven where aspiring writers can stay for free - Allen Ginsberg and Anaïs Nin have both been guests in the past. Originally established in 1919 by an American called Sylvia Beach, fellow expatriate George Whitman took over Shakespeare and Company after Beach's death in 1951. Crane.tv meets with Whitman's daughter, Sylvia to hear about the future of this historical, literary gem." Address: 37 rue de la Bûcherie, 75005, Paris. http://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/ - Amira

“At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream.” - Amira

The universe gained an observer. So did the universe exist before someone was around to observe it? I think the mark of sentience is determined by the length and breadth of an intelligent observer's vision and understanding of the universe. - Adrian

"Mono no aware, literally "the pathos of things", also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of impermanence, or the transience of things, and a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... "Mono means things, and aware comes from the ancient Japanese exclamation ‘Ah(a)!’. In early Heian times (794-1185) aware became a noun designating a profound and individual emotion that one experiences in communion with the transient beauty of a person, an event, a natural object or a work of art. Aware is sometimes called the ‘ah!-ness of things’ you feel when confronted with beauty and at the same time are conscious of the transience or incompleteness of this beauty. Aware transcends the feelings of sadness and joy and merges these into a new, profound emotion. (...)" - Amira

"In the 12th and 13th centuries Southern France saw the troubadours turning their feelings of love, what they called fin’amor, into exquisite poetry. The basis of fin’amor was an emotion called joy. Joy caused an ecstatic experience in which the lover appreciated simultaneously the happiness as well as the sadness, the gaiety as well as the pains, of loving. The same is true for 'mono no aware', where an object, person or situation can cause a feeling encompassing happiness as well as sadness, and where experiencing both elements is essential to the emotion. When one experiences fin’amor one forgets all about oneself. One can live life without the obstructions from one’s self-created ego and enjoy every component of one’s emotions, be they happy or sad." - Amira

check out the novel Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata ! his literary voice embodies the fleetingness of "Mono no aware." - Adriano

I found the Snow Country in the library yesterday, thanks for the pointing it out! - Amira

"While the physical sciences are a continuously evolving source of technology and of understanding about our world, they have become so specialized and rely on so much prerequisite knowledge that for many people today the divide between the sciences and the humanities seems even greater than it was when C. P. Snow delivered his famous 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures." In A Cultural History of Physics, Hungarian scientist and educator Károly Simonyi succeeds in bridging this chasm by describing the experimental methods and theoretical interpretations that created scientific knowledge, from ancient times to the present day, within the cultural environment in which it was formed. Unlike any other work of its kind, Simonyi’s seminal opus explores the interplay of science and the humanities to convey the wonder and excitement of scientific development throughout the ages." - Amira

"Using a combination of various Google technologies and expert information provided by our museum partners, we have created a unique online art experience. Users can explore a wide range of artworks at brushstroke level detail, take a virtual tour of a museum and even build their own collections to share. With a team of Googlers working across many product areas we are able to harness the best of Google to power the Art Project experience. Few people will ever be lucky enough to be able to visit every museum or see every work of art they’re interested in but now many more can enjoy over 30 000 works of art from sculpture to architecture and drawings and explore over 150 collections from 40 countries, all in one place. We’re also lucky at Google to have the technology to make this kind of project a reality." - Amira

A short vignette of a book being created using traditional printing methods. - Amira

almost looks a Loeb edition of Pindar odes :-) - Adriano

:-) - Amira

"The spectacular image of extreme kayakers looking over the ferocious torrent has been shortlisted for a photo exhibition. (...) Photographers from more than 90 countries braved treacherous conditions to take pictures for the first Red Bull Illume Image Quest. Competition judges, who spent hours sifting through 7,200 photos, were looking for "images that embody commitment, passion and risk in addition to technical superiority, artistic flair and overall excellence"." // "The 3,540km long Zambezi is a gigantic and intimidating force of nature. From its source in Zambia, Africa’s fourth-longest river meanders through Angola, along the borders of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe to Mozambique, where it empties into the Indian Ocean." https://www.redbullillume.com/insight... - Amira

"A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead." — Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) - Amira

I love that opening line of Murphy :) - Eivind

“The survival of an endangered language may depend on two people — and all they want to do is ignore each other. Manuel Segovia and Isidro Velazquez, the last speakers of a language called Ayapaneco, live less than half a mile away from each other in Ayapa, Mexico. But no matter how precious the cultural implications of keeping their language alive are, they are not going to speak to each other. (…) The Guardian notes that, “It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other’s company.” Ayapaneco is one of many dozens of indigenous languages remaining in Mexico. Perhaps the most extreme case, it managed to survive the Spanish conquest in Mexico. Sixty-eight native languages are still in use today, although a handful are on the verge of extinction. Regardless, linguists are still attempting to preserve the language despite the lack of communication between the last two fluent speakers, who no longer converse with anyone regularly in their native tongue. When Segovia, 75, and Velazquez, 65, both die, their language will pass away with them. Still, Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist, sums up their relationship succinctly: “They don’t have a lot in common.” - Amira

“There is something about stone that calls forth the desire to touch it, and to shape it with our desires and emotions,” said Professor Susan Broomhall, acting director of the Centre for the History of Emotions, based at The University of Western Australia. “Those desires can take different forms, from Aboriginal rock art, medieval cathedrals, stone memorials or diamond engagement rings. Stone is a feature of many natural landscapes, and the history of our relationship with stone is a significant part of the history of emotions.” (...) What range of emotions governs the act of engraving initials, graffiti, or supplementary artwork onto the stone monuments of pre-modern Europe or indigenous rock art? What varied emotional responses do we have to these interventions and why? (...) “We are not thinking in abstract and analytical ways about emotions, but how we actually can give voice to the way that we feel about temporality, time, memory and the past; how stone can act as a conduit of emotion.” - Amira

Abstract: "The wide adoption of social media has increased the competition among ideas for our finite attention. We employ a parsimonious agent-based model to study whether such a competition may affect the popularity of different memes, the diversity of information we are exposed to, and the fading of our collective interests for specific topics. Agents share messages on a social network but can only pay attention to a portion of the information they receive. In the emerging dynamics of information diffusion, a few memes go viral while most do not. The predictions of our model are consistent with empirical data from Twitter, a popular microblogging platform. Surprisingly, we can explain the massive heterogeneity in the popularity and persistence of memes as deriving from a combination of the competition for our limited attention and the structure of the social network, without the need to assume different intrinsic values among ideas." - Amira

"The brain appears to be wired in a rectangular 3D grid structure, suggests a new brain imaging study. (...) “Far from being just a tangle of wires, the brain’s connections turn out to be more like ribbon cables — folding 2D sheets of parallel neuronal fibers that cross paths at right angles, like the warp and weft of a fabric,” (...) “The wiring of the mature brain appears to mirror three primal pathways established in embryonic development.” (...) “Before, we had just driving directions. Now, we have a map showing how all the highways and byways are interconnected,” said Wedeen. “Brain wiring is not like the wiring in your basement, where it just needs to connect the right endpoints. Rather, the grid is the language of the brain and wiring and re-wiring work by modifying it.” - Amira

"By looking at how the pathways fit in the brain, we anticipated the connectivity to resemble that of a bowl of spaghetti, a very narrow and discreet object," (...) "We discovered that the pathways in the top of the brain are all organized like woven sheets with the fibers running in two directions in the sheets and in a third direction perpendicular to the sheets. These sheets all stack together so that the entire connectivity of the brain follows three precisely defined directions." (...) "This is the first time it has ever been determined that the geometry of the brain is described by a three-dimensional grid," (...) "The research took MRI scanners and new mathematical algorithms to determine a geometry to the relationship of nearby pathways in the brain so that each pathway was part of a two-dimensional sheet of pathways that together looked exactly like a woven sheet of fabric," Each pathway was part of a parallel series next to it crossed by a perpendicular series at a right angle, together which formed a woven grid. The structure was part of a three-dimensional scaffold connections of the brain conformed to the extremely simple three-dimensional structure, a single woven grid with fibers in only three axes. By using diffusion MRI and mapping the three-dimension motion of the water molecules in the brain, the scientists ran the maps through mathematical algorithms that inferred from the water motion pattern the fiber architecture of the tissue of the brain." http://www.nsf.gov/news... - Amira

hmmm grid ha.. (cilgin teori ureticem quantum muantum) - bebekafa

"Certain genes and proteins that promote growth and development of embryos also play a surprising role in sending chemical signals that help adults learn, remember, forget and perhaps become addicted, University of Utah biologists have discovered. "We found that these molecules and signaling pathways [named Wnt] do not retire after development of the organism, but have a new and surprising role in the adult. They are called back to action to change the properties of the nervous system in response to experience," (...) "Almost certainly what we have discovered is going on in our brain as well," (...)" - Amira

"Synapse Plasticity is the Basis of Learning and Memory (...) Proteins known as receptors are delivered to the synapses or removed from them to strengthen or weaken the connection. (...) The Wnt signaling identified in the new study "tells the depot to put more receptors into the synapse -- or not," (...) By crippling various genes in the worms, the researchers identified the "signaling pathway" by which a Wnt protein in one nerve cell sends a chemical signal to another cell telling it to increase the number of receptors on its surface, thus increasing the strength or volume of nerve signals between the cells. (...) "Addiction is like learning at a primitive level," Maricq says. "Addiction means that somewhere in your brain, synapses are too strong. So you want more." - Amira

"The number-one reason why nannies in Manhattan can get paid $200,000 is very simple. Rich families can afford it. (...) Six-figure nannies don't rule the world, but they help explain the world of prices. On a global scale, the price of locally-delivered services, such as nannies and barbers, fluctuate wildly from country to country. A simple haircut in Uzbekistan is much, much cheaper than a simple haircut in Beverly Hills. (...) Why some prices between countries (and even between cities in the same country) differ so dramatically. The most elegant of these theories is known, less elegantly, as the Balassa-Samuelson Effect, after two economists Béla Balassa and Paul Samuelson. The Balassa-Samuelson Effect is a mouthful. Let's call it the "Nanny Effect." In a nutshell, the Nanny Effect says that the price of some goods -- e.g.: Picasso paintings, barrels of oil, bricks of gold, and company stock -- shouldn't vary much by location, because it would create opportunities for arbitrage. (...) There is much more to price levels than the Nanny Effect. Much, much, much more. Restrictive urban policy raises the price of rent in similarly productive cities. Energy policies and levies raise or lower the price of gas. Tariffs raise the price of imports. On a nation-by-nation basis, taxes restrain demand and subsidies increase supply on an idiosyncratic basis." - Amira

"But perhaps the easiest way to mess with Balassa and Samuelson is for a government to manipulate foreign exchange rates. China, for example, is famous for pegging its currency to the U.S. dollar to make its exports more competitive. As a result, services in China are probably cheaper than they would be if the government weren't actively trying to depreciate the currency. If you're happily wondering "Why is China so cheap?" you should thank Beijing. "The B-S Effect [er, Nanny Effect!] explains why on average, prices vary across countries, but in the short to medium run, the exchange rate will also determine how cheap or expensive different countries are," (...) Another way to see this in action is to read the Economist's latest cost-of-living index for cities, an sample of which are in the graph below. The top of the list was dominated by Switzerland (and, to a lesser extent, Japan and Australia). Why Switzerland? Blame Greece and Germany. The debt crisis sweeping Europe has created a flight to safety to Swiss Francs, which are considered safer. As the Franc appreciated, prices have gone up compared to the euro and the dollar. Japan and Australia have also seen strong currency appreciation over the last few years, which made it relatively expensive for foreigners. (...) If we had to boil all this -- Balassa-Samuelson, Nanny Effect,exchange rates, urban policy -- down to a sentence, it might be this: All things equal, prices rise fastest in the places where rich, talented people want to be." - Amira

"I'm an explorer okay, I get curious about everything and I want to investigate all kinds of stuff." -- R.F. "In 1989, PBS’ NOVA aired The Last Journey of a Genius, a television film that documents the final days of the great physicist Richard Feynman and his obsession with traveling to Tannu Tuva, a state outside of outer Mongolia, which then remained under Soviet control. For the better part of a decade, Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton schemed to make their way to Tannu Tuva, but Cold War politics always frustrated their efforts. The video runs roughly 50 minutes and features an ailing Feynman talking about his wanderlust and their maneuverings. He died two weeks later, having never made the trip, though Ralph Leighton and Feyman’s daughter Michelle later landed in their Shangri-La. Her journey was recorded by the Russian service of the BBC." http://www.openculture.com/2011... - Amira

Whoa listen to him play the bongos! - Adrian

"What is information? While it is a good question, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft thinks it misses a fundamental point. Instead of asking about the physical world as we currently understand it, one should ask how it came to be that way in the first place and how it evolves with time. To solve this problem, ’t Hooft suspects scientists will have to look beyond quantum physics—to a “pre-quantum theory”—and into a level of reality in which information in a three-dimensional world is lost beneath a two-dimensional veneer." - Amira

"We now live in a world where they did get loose—a world increasingly run by self-replicating strings of code. Everything we love and use today is, in a lot of ways, self-reproducing exactly as Turing, von Neumann, and Barricelli prescribed. It’s a very symbiotic relationship: the same way life found a way to use the self-replicating qualities of these polynucleotide molecules to the great benefit of life as a whole, there’s no reason life won’t use the self-replicating abilities of digital code, and that’s what’s happening. (…) In 1945 we actually did create a new universe. This is a universe of numbers with a life of their own, that we only see in terms of what those numbers can do for us. (...) And that’s not just a metaphor for something else. It actually is. It’s a physical reality. (...) But it was Turing who developed the one-dimensional model, and von Neumann who developed the two-dimensional implementation, for this increasingly three-dimensional digital universe in which everything we do is immersed. And so, the next breakthrough in understanding will also I think come from some oddball. It won’t be one of our great, known scientists. It’ll be some 22-year-old kid somewhere who makes more sense of this. (...)" - Amira

"We’re seeing a fraction of one percent of it, and there’s this other 99.99 percent that people just aren’t looking at. (...) I think they [Turing & von Neumann] would be immediately fascinated by the way biological code and digital code are now intertwined. Von Neumann’s consuming passion at the end was self-reproducing automata. And Alan Turing was interested in the question of how molecules could self-organize to produce organisms. (...) They would be amazed by the direct connection between the code running on computers and the code running in biology—that all these biotech companies are directly reading and writing nucleotide sequences in and out of electronic memory, with almost no human intervention. That’s more or less completely mechanized now, so there’s direct translation, and once you translate to nucleotides, it’s a small step, a difficult step, but, an inevitable step to translate directly to proteins. And that’s Craig Venter’s world, and it’s a very, very different world when we get there." - Amira

Holy crap, he looks just like his dad now! - Ken Morley

"A History of the World was a partnership between the BBC and the British Museum (...) The programmes told a history of two million years of humanity through the objects we have made, starting with the earliest object in the museum’s collection. Deep zoom imagery of the British Museum objects on the site lets you see the objects in stunning detail while listening to the programme." - Amira

"Dramatic 3-D videos, created from actual data, show the origins of the universe. Now playing on screens at SLAC, as well as museums in San Francisco and New York. (...) Diaphanous veils of semi-transparent fluorescing gas and dust swirl hypnotically among exploding stars; colliding galaxies dance a cosmic do-si-do before they coalesce. These are some of the compelling scenes shown in the second-floor Visualization Lab of SLAC's Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC.) (...) "It's an immersive environment," Abel said. "You can explore three-dimensional data, 'Avatar'-style. It's wonderful to have the sensation of being inside the cosmological data." KIPAC's newly redesigned website http://kipac.stanford.edu/kipac... features an elegant gallery http://kipac.stanford.edu/kipac... for the movies and images. (...) As Hahn put it, "These videos aren't just screensavers. They show us how the universe really works." - Amira