Adriano

"You’re a complete incomplete idiot, and I’m not going to apply this patch because it’s obviously broken and is a total piece of sh*t. And here’s why… If you still don’t like it that’s ok: that’s why I’m boss. I simply know better than you do. Furthermore, I claim that anybody that hasn’t noticed by now that I’m an opinionated bastard, and that “impolite” is my middle name, is lacking a few clues." - Adriano

there were no credits listed :( The first is a look at the Golden Gate Bridge from Marin county. Fill in the blank _________ for the second... - Adriano

"David Christian discusses the chronometric revolution, and how this has lead to a single historical continuum stretching all the way back to the big bang, allowing for what he calls, Grand Unified Stories. Murray Gell-Mann discusses the nature of empirical regularities, and their relationship to measures of complexity. Gell-Mann illustrates how apparently complex histories and patterns can sometimes be organized using simple models of growth and scaling. Fred Spier, speaking as an historian, explores how big history might be brought within a reductive framework of physics, using the concept of free energy rate density, as a means of organizing major transitions, from the abiotic to the biotic and cultural domains. Peter Turchin explores the value of general quantitative theory in areas where prediction is limited, and comparative data and retrodiction need to be explored. Geoffrey West argues that is unlikely that we shall discern common patterns at the level of individuals, but if we allow ourselves to study collective phenomena, such as urban systems, then we might make surprising new discoveries." - Adriano

"Writing to a female admirer of his only novel, "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" (1910), Rilke, perhaps with the war at the forefront of his mind, quickly turns to the question of how it is possible to live when life is so "incomprehensible." It isn't, he answers, unless we embrace all that is beyond our control, including death. We wrongly treat death as unnatural, Rilke argues. We bracket it out when we should accept it as part of the cycle of life. "When a tree begins to bud," Rilke writes, "both death and life spring up in it." To embrace death is to embrace the "incomprehensible," which, for the poet, is another name for God. As these letters show, Rilke's search for God was really a search for self." - Adriano

posted only for its entertainment value :-) ref: http://ff.im/YxXUL - Adriano

"One of the ways that we knew that what we had was a synthetic cell was by watermarking the DNA so we could always tell our synthetic species from any naturally occurring one. We built in the names of the 46 scientists that contributed to the effort, and also there was a message with an URL. Of the three quotes, probably the most important one is James Joyce, "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life." The second is from Oppenheimer's biography, American Prometheus: "See things not as they are, but as they might be." The third, from Richard Feynman, "What I cannot build, I cannot understand." Then we started getting e-mail from a Caltech scientist saying we misquoted Richard Feynman. To prove his point, he sent a picture of Feynman's blackboard with the original quotation, and it was, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." I think it's a much better quotation, and we've gone back to correct the DNA code so that Feynman can rest much more peacefully." --J. Craig Venter - Adriano

"The apparatus was said to have been developed by Eskimos and invented - according to circus lore - by a French trapeze artist named du Trampolin. More officially, American inventor George Nissen designed the first modern-style trampoline in 1936. The 2000 Olympics was the first to include competition on trampoline." Australian Ji Wallace, who finished second-place in 2000 said: "I think every kid has a trampoline. It was thought of as a backyard sport." Well, yes, I still think so... History, http://www.nbcolympics.com/trampol... - Adriano

RT "The last day of the Olympics should be all the gold medalists playing DODGEBALL until we have an ultimate champion." :-) https://twitter.com/FillWer... - Adriano

yesterday I saw the races involving bikes for little kids -- expect skateboarding to become officially Olympic soon. - Adriano

"Until now, the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were considered unforeseen surprise attacks. However, it has recently come to light that Japan detected American preparations prior to the attacks. The program examines developments on the Japanese side surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Why was the tragedy of the A-bomb repeated, even when Japan knew an attack was imminent?" Special Intelligence unit knew that the second bomber also used call sign V675 which only days earlier had destroyed Hiroshima, however, the Japanese fighter crew just 11 miles north of Nagasaki was never ordered to intercept the B-29 bomber which departed from Tinian island. Not even an air raid warning was issued to the inhabitants: 60% of Nagasaki was destroyed and approximately 70,000 people were killed. - Adriano

"Allied military leaders were appalled by the use of the atomic bombs. General Eisenhower recognized that Japan was ready to surrender and said, "It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." General Hap Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Corps pointed out, "Atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." Admiral William Leahy, Truman's chief of staff, said: "The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. In being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to barbarians of the Dark Ages. Wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." What Truman had described as "the greatest thing in history" was actually, according to his own military leaders, an act of unparalleled cowardice, the mass annihilation of men, women and children." http://www.indepthnews.info/index... - Adriano

cf. the suppression of information by the Japanese government regarding the diffusion of radioactive material from the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster: http://nakamura-syounika.cocol... - Adriano

"Schrödinger citing the second law of thermodynamics, described his notion of "order based on order." We have now shown using synthetic DNA genomes that when you put new DNA software into the cell the protein robots coded for are produced, changing the cellular phenotype. When you change the DNA software you change the species. This is consistent with Schrödinger's code-script and "an organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a 'stream of order' on itself..." WE CAN DIGITIZE LIFE, and we generate life from the digital world. Just as the ribosome can convert the analogue message in mRNA into a protein robot, it's becoming standard now in the world of science to convert digital code into protein viruses and cells. Scientists send digital code to each other instead of sending genes or proteins. It's faster and cheaper to synthesize a gene than it is to clone it, or even get it by Federal Express." // James Watson: "I want to congratulate Craig on a very BEAUTIFUL lecture." - Adriano

That's some bad sound. - Todd Hoff

Phelps pictured as a nirvana dolphin :-) "The goal for the 50-meter freestyle final couldn't be any simpler: Get to the other edge of the pool as fast as possible. But the stroke that may propel humans through water faster than any other, the DOLPHIN KICK, is banned after the first 15 meters. Critics say the current limits on underwater swimming violate the notion that there's anything "free" about a freestyle race. They say the lack of choice discourages swimmers from trying new things in the pool. Without changes the 50-meter world record of 20.91 seconds, set in 2009, may stand for a long time. The current record was set before the sport banned a generation of high-tech polyurethane SWIMSUITS. When Denis Pankratov and Misty Hyman brought underwater swimming to the butterfly with 30-meter underwater dolphin-kick starts at the 1996 Games, FINA extended the 15-meter rule to butterfly and freestyle. An underwater swim race is probably not the best spectator event. But it is nonsensical to say swimmers can't be UNDERWATER for 20 to 25 seconds, in a 50-meter race." - Adriano

Freestyle diving... WTF, What the Feck! http://i.imgur.com/cUCda.gif German diver Stephan Feck's second round attempt in the Men's 3m springboard event. Larger and better GIF, http://qph.cf.quoracdn.net/main-qi... - Adriano

1. "Skydiving is the place where you learn to freefall and practice the skills you'll need to safely take up wingsuit BASE. In order to fly a wingsuit in the U.S. at a USPA Group Member dropzone, you'll need to complete at least 200 jumps in 18 months (or 500 total jumps). In freefall, the extra surface area of the wings magnifies even the slightest control inputs from the flyer. In 120mph wind, you can see how tripling your body's surface area can make some dramatic differences. Freefall is already a world of subtlety, where the slightest movement can have a big impact. So by getting enough jumps to be comfortable and safe, you're already accustomed to the small moves necessary to safely fly a suit. At deployment time, body position is crucial. If your body is asymmetrical in any way, you can wind up causing a malfunction or sending yourself into line twists." More details: http://www.quora.com/What-do... - Adriano

123 BPM mixed set full of Classics and Great vibes, so Move Your Body :-) - Adriano

"And so Mario Draghi and Ben Bernanke will try to sell us 76 more trombones. Sooner or later we'll discover that their money illusion can't save an economy from its more fundamental problems, and that they may even be interfering with the faster growth they want. \\ Near-zero interest rates have disguised the cost of the government's fiscal mismanagement. By keeping the Treasury's borrowing costs artificially low, the Fed has reduced the urgency to cut spending and guaranteed an explosion in financing costs when interest rates do inevitably rise." - Adriano

"Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921, Mr. Marker hid many aspects of his biography. He once claimed he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, though some sources have cited his place of birth as the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. The pseudonym Chris Marker -- which originally appeared in print as "Chris. Marker" -- dates from the late 1940s, when he published criticism, editorials, poetry and fiction. "Sans Soleil" (1982), often acknowledged as the masterpiece among Marker’s late works, is one of his least classifiable, a free-associative mix of ethnography, philosophy and poetry. Purporting to be the footage of a fictional cinematographer accompanied by his letters to a nameless woman, the film roams from Iceland to Guinea-Bissau to Japan. He then made two essays on Soviet cinema and history centered on the neglected director Alexander Medvedkin, one elegy to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky ("One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich") and a portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of the 1985 film "Ran" ("A.K.")." - Adriano

"The human brain's connections turn out to be a an orderly 3D grid structure with no diagonals. 2D sheets of parallel fibers cross at right angles -- "like the warp and weft of a fabric." The first pictures from the most powerful brain scanner of its kind reveal an "astonishingly simple architecture." This diffusion spectrum image of a whole human brain came from the new Connectom scanner, part of the NIH's Human Connectome Project." http://www.nih.gov/news... \\ See also Science 30 March 2012, 335(6076):1628-1634, http://www.sciencemag.org/content... - Adriano

"This project contains most of the Web Audio pipeline from the Bob Moog Doodle that ran on the Google homepage on May 23rd, 2012. You can see the Doodle at: https://www.google.com/doodles... The intention of this open source project is to provide a moderately complex example of how one might use the Web Audio API to make a digital synthesizer on the web. You can use your mouse or computer keyboard to control the mini-synthesizer’s keys and knobs to make nearly limitless sounds. Keeping with the theme of 1960s music technology, we patched the keyboard into a 4-track tape recorder so you can record, play back and share songs via short links or Google+." - Adriano

In the realm of all astronaut photographs this one probably holds the most veracity for me because Stanley Kubrick created what Baudrillard calls "hyper-reality" -- using cinematic signs in a hermetically self-contained film (not even including the Star Child part where the black monolith consumes Bowman and leads him through a metamorphosis from matter to pure energy :-) To this date, many concepts of being-in-space implicitly reference 2001, not actual experience. Also, unlike the communication between astronauts and Houston, the dialogue between Bowman and HAL 9000 is truly unforgettable. In short, we don't have detailed narratives of real astronauts which we can read into their photographs. - Adriano

in today's news: "Images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (LRO) show that the American flags planted on the Moon by Apollo astronauts are mostly still standing. The flags are still casting shadows -- except the one planted during the Apollo 11 mission. This matches Buzz Aldrin's account of the flag being knocked over by engine exhaust as Apollo 11 lifted off." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news... - Adriano

you may ask yourself, why isn't David in a gigantic suit? :-) Tighter back-up band. - Adriano

"Years later at the Waldorf in New York, where I had a very nice suite, I invited Miles to dinner. The face of the maitre d'hotel when he came in was indescribable. After two hours, the food was more or less thrown in our faces. At four o'clock in the morning I got a call from Miles, who in tears said: "I don't ever want to see you again here, in a country where this kind of relationship is impossible." I suddenly understood that I'd made a terrible mistake, from which came a strange feeling of humiliation that I'll never forget. In America his colour was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris I didn't even notice that he was black. Between Miles and me there was a great love affair, the kind you'd want everybody to experience. Throughout our lives, we were never lost to each other." - Adriano

Sous le ciel de Paris, http://ff.im/wMpoH \\ So what, http://ff.im/YcD8t - Adriano

Sad but beautiful story ... - Sepi ⌘ سپی

il faut écouter cette chanson http://ff.im/11pydw :-) - Adriano

“Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is 'elephant'.” ― Charles Chaplin :-) - Amira

"Our ability to conceptualize our own end creates tremendous psychic strains within us; in each man’s chest a tiny ferret of fear at this ultimate knowledge gnaws away at his ego and his sense of purpose. If man really sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. \\ The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; as a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong -- and lucky -- he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. He can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining." - Adriano

Happy Birthday ! LIFE photos from the set of 2001, http://life.time.com/culture... -- "there’s something about Kubrick’s strange, insular onscreen universe that commands our attention. 2001 remains one of those exceedingly rare works of art that feels intrinsically indifferent: indifferent to the usual laws of filmmaking; indifferent to criticism (or praise)." - Adriano

"Vertebrates emerged around 500 million years ago from a massive evolutionary upheaval at the bottom of the ocean that involved two successive doublings in the amount of DNA in a marine invertebrate. These dramatic events triggered the evolution of a new animal, which became the ancestor of the backboned fishes, birds, reptiles and mammals, including humans. These ancient DNA doublings boosted internal communication systems. The downside is that communication breakdowns cause diabetes, cancer and neurological disorders. You can still see the "family resemblance" between amphioxus and humans, because it has a nerve cord running down its back, blocks of muscle, and branchial arches where we have facial structures. However, amphioxus has no bones, no brain, no face and no heart. It is because of the two genome duplications that we gained the complexity to develop all these features." http://rsob.royalsocietypublis... - Adriano

We are all originally pond scum. - Eric Logan

Amphioxus embryonic development from fertilization to mid-neurula: http://youtu.be/ycHJMXUT2o0 by Alain Camasses and Hector Escriva at Laboratoire Arago, Banyuls sur Mer, France. \\ « Au moment de notre conception, nous sommes une simple boule. » - Adriano

There's prior research from 2008 (much more readable) estimating the evolutionary distance ~520 million years: "The amphioxus genome illuminates vertebrate origins and cephalochordate biology" Genome Res. 18(7):1100–1111, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc... - Adriano

Difference between chemistry and cooking? Never lick the spoon, yolo :-) - Adriano

trivia: Walter White drives a tan 2004 Pontiac Aztek. It was discontinued after the 2005 model year -- criticized by George Ouzounian as the world's second ugliest car: "pilfering the Aztecs of their last remaining treasure, their name." #BreakingBad - Adriano

LOL - Sepi ⌘ سپی

trivia2: Save Walter White, http://www.savewalterwhite.com, is a *real* site -- check it out. Donations do not go the White family, but rather to the National Cancer Coalition. \\ White's budget as infographic: http://goo.gl/URpCA - Adriano

"We are prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our own ongoing conscious experience, our current phenomenology. Even in this apparently privileged domain, our self-knowledge is faulty and untrustworthy. We are not simply fallible at the margins but broadly inept. Examples highlighted in this essay include: emotional experience (for example, is it entirely bodily; does joy have a common, distinctive phenomenological core?), peripheral vision (how broad and stable is the region of visual clarity?), and the phenomenology of thought (does it have a distinctive phenomenology, beyond just imagery and feelings?). Cartesian skeptical scenarios undermine knowledge of ongoing conscious experience as well as knowledge of the outside world. Infallible judgments about ongoing mental states are simply banal cases of self-fulfillment. Philosophical foundationalism supposing that we infer an external world from secure knowledge of our own consciousness is almost exactly backward." - Adriano

(And here's a reliable photo of Eric, http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwi... :-) - Adriano

"FDA decided to ban the sale of any imported French cheese from raw milk that is not aged for a minimum of 60 days. The thinking was/is that the curing process kills the bacteria (and recent research suggests that even that may not always work: e.g. E. coli O157). If they're made with pasteurized milk, they're fine. Thus newer French Brie cheese made with pasteurized milk can be sold in the US. But they are less tasty than the "real" French version -- also, real peak flavor comes at a time less than 60 days." \\ Le foie gras français interdit en Californie, http://ff.im/11h99C - Adriano

Is there somewhere I can contribute to the French cheese lobby, or is it already too late? - Ken Morley

"Bioengineers have made an artificial jellyfish using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart. The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart. “Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University. Parker’s lab works on creating artificial models of human heart tissues for regenerating organs and testing drugs, and the team built the medusoid as a way of understanding the “fundamental laws of muscular pumps”. It is an engineer’s approach to basic science: prove that you have identified the right principles by building something with them." \\ A tissue-engineered jellyfish with biomimetic propulsion http://www.nature.com/nbt... - Adriano

26 April 1980: "Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details. Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast, and move on. An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that. To write aphorisms is to assume a mask — a mask of scorn, of superiority. Which, in one great tradition, conceals (shapes) the aphorist’s secret pursuit of spiritual salvation." - Adriano

6 May 1980: "With the (1943) epigraph of Canetti. "The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well." Can it be that the literature of aphorisms teaches us the sameness of wisdom? [T]he traditional thematics of the aphorist: the hypocrisies of societies, the vanities of human wishes, the shallowness + deviousness of women; the sham of love; the pleasures (and necessity) of solitude; + the intricacies of one’s own thought processes." - Adriano

"Unique twist on the vocals on this track that come in at the half way mark." cf. Pleasurekraft + Belocca - Murdered Out (Original Mix) http://soundcloud.com/pleasur... - Adriano

Nice - Sepi ⌘ سپی

"Black holes may not effect the light through mass but it can curve the spacetime to such a degree that the space the light is traveling across is warped such that the light does not escape while the black hole exists. Imagine a ray of light is trying to cross the path of this black hole above but space itself is pulled inwards and streched making the trip longer then it elsewise would be. Light is travelling through space but the space itself gets warped such that the path of the light is a spiral towards the center of the black hole. This gravitation also effects time such that it effectively takes forever to cross this vastly stretched and warped region of space, or until the black hole itself ceases to exist." --Ariel Williams - Adriano

Terrific article! - Aryo

"Vladimir Nabokov wrote most of his drafts on index cards so that he could shuffle them about and carry them along with him on his butterfly expeditions [http://ff.im/QPF8V]. He kept blank cards under his pillow for whenever inspiration struck." - Adriano

re: _The Original of Laura_ : before Nabokov's death in 1977, he instructed his wife to burn the unfinished first draft—handwritten on 138 index cards—of what would be his final novel. She did not, and Nabokov's son, Dmitri, released them to the world. This very unfinished work reads largely like an outline, full of seeming notes-to-self and brief flashes of spectacular prose: http://i.imgur.com/ucUQu.jpg <- Knopf ed. w/ index cards! - Adriano

original of laura, he mi. o neymiş lan. - Alfonker Tapir

#nabokof - Alfonker Tapir

"People say my films are dark. But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world. The thing is, I get these ideas that I truly fall in love with. And a good movie idea is often like a girl you're in love with, but you know she's not the kind of girl you bring home to your parents, because they sometimes hold some dark and troubling things." - Adriano

Markus Covert et al. used data from more than 900 scientific papers to account for every molecular interaction that takes place in the life cycle of Mycoplasma genitalium which contains the smallest genome of any free-living organism: 525 genes. Complex phenotypes can be modeled by integrating cell processes into a single model. Unobserved cellular behaviors, new biological processes and parameters are predicted by this bio-CAD model -- including in vivo rates of protein-DNA association and an inverse relationship between the durations of DNA replication initiation and replication. \\ A giant step for Artificial Life! - Adriano