gold.

was trolling ‘how do magnets work’ tards on omegle and starting chatting to some guy about beavis and butthead for a while. more episodes than i expected on youtube.

memories.

gold.

i cry.

realise i’ve posted this picture before, but the video is worth the repost. this makes me tear up every time. listen carefully, and if you’re not drawn in by carl sagan’s voice something is wrong with you.

watch it at least twice. the only other science documentay i cried at the end was roving mars.

cheers, carl sagan.

gold.

i’ve been absent of late for a few reasons i’d rather not publish, suffice it to say that time has been holidaying in my hands. instead of productive, effective and useful forays into the 21st century accelerated culture, i’ve been a bit of a troll.

it all started with my good old friend /b/. i’ve spoken about 4chan before and the wild west nature of its activities, but like the sun i’m drawn to it’s spectacular, disgusting car-crash gravity.

i’ve used, abused and been sickened by chatroulette before (see this south park clip for a summary) but it wasn’t until i saw what /b/ had been using it for with a program called manycam that i became addicted.

the premise is this – you use an animation to trick another person that what they are really seeing is your actual webcam. press print screen and hilarity ensues.

i must warn you some of these are incredibly nsfw, verging on thinking that i need some sort of psychiatric treatment, but i’ll explain along the way.

gold.

i remember my first time.

i was working nightshift, on my lunch (aboot 4am) and it was just as it was starting to break.

it makes me think of chan. and what the internet was made for.

[edit]

worth watching the whole thing. what a channel.

another one via questlove

gold.

i was chatting to my neighbour and his girlfriend and she was telling a story of how one of her friends said to her out of the blue, “i was just thinking about when that whale exploded”. i then proceeded to get very animated about how i loved the video, couldn’t believe they did it, ‘only in america’ etc. turns out she was talking about a bit from ‘inside natures giants‘.

still, it’s a fucking great video.

gold.

from back in the day, yo.

also, related, and also still gold; remix.

cheers, memory lane/thebackupdvdsimadeon04/06/05

gold.

just wait till the end.

internet – what would we do without you?

gold.

reminds me of:

a popular 4chan meme

gold.

that’s what i do. just ask donkey kong; he’s in my crew.

also, #1 and #3.

cheers, teh youtubes/howtoputyoutubeinwordpress.com forum page.

gold.

not mine. yet.

why i fucking love being alive in the 21st century.

e and k are currently on holiday in laos. i’ve been following their travels using wikitravel and flickr et al (for other peoples photos of the area). i would be using gearth but my connection isn’t good enough at home.

i’m sitting following my sunday routine, digesting my feeds.

digsby pops up with an email from e. he tells me they’ve just done a laotian cooking course and made the most amazing dish called mok pa.

i google it, find (of course), laocook blog with video instruction (with a-team intro, by a guy with a london accent).

one of the ingredients is banana leaf. unlikely they sell it in a supermarket, so i google ‘asian supermarket portsmouth’ and find ‘akrams oriental supermarket’ in southsea.

i skype them, speak to the guy and find out they do sell them (frozen).

i get the postcode and its sitting in my satnav waiting to go.

its taken 5mins.

i’m in my dressing gown with a coffee.

damn straight.

cheers, e/laocook.

[edit - an hour and a half later]

just have to defrost the banana leaves

gold.

best photo of the year.

lets start with this. not only does it represent everything that i love and am passionate for in science and humanity, it makes me said to think i probably won’t be around in a hundred years to look back and feel nostalgic. its a photo of the phoenix lander parachuting onto martian soil, taken by the mars reconnaissance orbiter. typing that sentence makes me warm inside. in the vastness of our solar system, the huge martian landscape we are able to capture – midflight – one of our robots.

which brings me onto another great photo from earlier this year.

gold.

richard feyman‘s orange juice song.

one of my favourite people.

“i have a friend who’s an artist and he’s some times taken a view which i don’t agree with very well. he’ll hold up a flower and say, “look how beautiful it is,” and i’ll agree, i think. and he says, “you see, i as an artist i can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” and i think he’s kind of nutty.

first of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, i believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is. but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower.

at the same time, i see much more about the flower that he sees. i could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. i mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter: there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure…also the processes.

the fact that the colors in the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting – it means that insects can see the color.

it adds a question – does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms that are…why is it aesthetic, all kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower.

it only adds. i don’t understand how it subtracts.“

gold.

learn.

i came across a free course on game theory from yale university while i was reading my feeds and it made me realise this is what i’ve always wanted. education – for the rest of my life. for free. and i don’t have to get up.

sit back, and learn about:

an introduction to aerospace engineering and design (mit),or modern poetry (yale),or life in the palaeozoic (ou), or buddhist psychology (berkeley), or causal and statistical reasoning (carnegie mellon), there are hundreds.

and other people have done better work listing them:

open culture’s lists/ world lecture hall lists/ free-ed’s lists/ oedb’s lists/ education portal’s lists/ lifehacker’s lists/ the wikiversity/  jimmy ruska’s lists/ josh kaufman’s personal mba/ and the ted talks to finish.

from philomath, to polymath.

cheers, all.

gold.

the atlantic: have you ever tried to sell a diamond?

“within ten years, de beers succeeded beyond even its most optimistic expectations, creating a billion-dollar-a-year diamond market in japan, where matrimonial custom had survived feudal revolutions, world wars, industrialization, and even the american occupation.”

cheers, pearldiamondonline.